Christophe Herreman

Thanks to the free pass I got from Christoph Rooms at Adobe, I made it to the JavaPolis conference in Antwerp today. I visited the event last year and certainly didn’t want to miss it this year. There is a strange and attractive atmosphere of collective geeky-ness and it is oh so cool. The fact that there are people here from all over the globe proves that this is an interesting conference for every (Java) developer out there. Just like last year, this event seemed professionally organized. At the entrance, every attendee received a backpack with a shirt, a notepad and a conference magazine. There are several boots from vendors that give you interesting information on their products, reductions and of course tons of swag. There are also free drinks for everyone, dinner at noon and fruits and candies.

I arrived pretty late but just in time for the first session and found Peter Elst there as well. Up was a session on Flex for a full house. I think there were easily 500 people in the room. James Ward and Bruce Eckel (that’s right, THE Bruce Eckel) were pair presenting and did an excellent job at it. They thoroughly explained the advantages of using Flex as a presentation tier and showed some sample applications. Later on they walked us through an example on how to connect to JSP pages to fetch data and how to consume the Flickr API. The Java crowd seemed to like it and it gave me a confident feeling that we as a development team are using the right technology (Flex) for the right job (interactive user interfaces). Having Bruce Eckel over to present was probably the best move Adobe could make to convince a Java crowd.

Next session was on JavaFX by Jim Weaver. I hadn’t seen it in action before so this was my chance of getting to know it. Unfortunately I was not really impressed. The technology seemed to be ages behind on what we are doing today with Flex for RIA development and I can only imagine hard core Java developers wanting to use this. Of course their is a strong programming language behind it – just like C# is for Silverlight – but the whole thing feels like a desperate attempt to catch up with Adobe in the RIA space. I have the same feeling with Silverlight btw.

Last session was Erich Gamma on Jazz. He talked about how agile development teams are working today and how there still are many pain points in bringing all project information together. This being SCM, bug tracking, project management, iteration plans… Jazz attempts to bundle all this info in a single application that makes it easier to access project information for the whole team.