ITARC 20009 was a great success!

The Atlanta, GA edition of ITARC 2009 was held a couple of weeks ago and, based on the feedback I got from attendees and my own experience, it was a great success. Over 150 architects and people interested in becoming an architect spent two days in a beautiful environment (Thank you, IBM!), with good food, and learning from each other's experiences as well.

But the best thing was the wide variety of talks available, and the quality of the speakers (including Grady Booch via second life) who gave them. As a member of the chapter hosting the conference, and one of the speakers, I may be biased. But, I was able to attend a number of the talks and not only did I learn a good bit, but I found the speakers to interesting, well informed, and worth listening to.

The bottom line is that this year's ITARC was great and that you should make every effort to attend next year's Atlanta ITARC. For those of you not familiar with it, ITARC is short for "IT Architect Regional Conference"; so there may be one coming to your area later this year. I do know there's one scheduled for New York in late September, and you can always check the IASA home page for more information.

For any of you wondering about my talk, I'd say it went very well. The room was set up for 24 people but another eight or nine showed up and wound up standing in the back, so the attendance was excellent. During the talk itself, people looked interested and asked some questions, and the feedback I received from IASA indicted that the attendees enjoyed it and thought it was well done.

DevNexus 2009 review

DevNexus is the new name for the Atlanta Java DevCon conference, which is organized and hosted by volunteers from the Atlanta Java User Group (AJUG). The conference was recently re-branded as DevNexus because it's not limited to Java anymore. Don't get me wrong, Java is still a major focus, but there are other languages (some of which run on the JVM) and technologies that AJUG members use and we wanted to include those too.  

DevNexus has expanded to two days this year and may be even bigger next year. Not only that, but it went from two tracks to three, so there were even more tempting talks to choose from.

Speakers ranged from Neal Ford (Meme-Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, well known NFJS speaker, and author of The Productive Programmer) to Emmanuel Bernard (lead developer at JBoss, and spec lead for JSR  303: Bean Validation), to Peter Higgins (project lead for the Dojo toolkit) and Doris Chen and Justin Bolter (Technology Evangelists from Sun); and the topics were just as varied.

After some introductory remarks from Burr Sutter (Java Champion and AJUG top-dog), Neal Ford got the ball rolling Tuesday with his keynote "On the lam from the Furniture Police," which was an excellent look at how to be productive in a corporate environment that seems designed to prevent it. Neal's excellent keynote was followed by four hours of technical break out session on topics like Test Driven Design (not Development), browser optimization (aka getting around browser restrictions), grid computing, and how to create and use RESTful web-services with Java. The official day ended with Emmanuel Bernard's keynote on "Scaling Hibernate" which also gave us a look at some of the new features Hibernate supports, like sharding and full text search capability. After that, there was a "cocktail reception" for people who preferred a friendly chat (sometimes called networking) with other developers and architects over sitting in rush-hour traffic.

Wednesday got off to an interesting start. Doris Chen and Justin Bolter gave their keynote speech titled "JavaFX: The Platform for Rich Internet Applications" which, not surprisingly, promoted JavaFX as the best solution for Java developers who want to build RIAs. This was followed by Yakov Fain's keynote, "Picking the right technology for Rich Internet Applications" which compared Adobe's Flex, Microsoft's Silverlight, and JavaFX. During the speech he stated his belief that JavaFX might be a contender in 2010, but not today. I found this a little disconcerting, having just heard about what JavaFX can do. While I'm not sure I agree with him, I do think Yakov made some good points, though things may change with the release of JavaFX 2.0 slated for later this year. In case you're interested, his recommendation for developers that need to start an RIA project today was to use Flex.

After the clash of the RIA titans, there were three hours of breakouts mostly geared toward RIA or web development; topics included JavaFX, Java and Flex, developing modular Web applications using Spring 3.0, and GWT.  There were also some server-side topics like a JEE 6 preview, a look at Spring 3.0, JSecurity also known as Apache's project 'Ki', anda look at JVM-based dynamic languages in the enterprise.

The conference ended with a rap-session hosted by Burr Sutter, AJUG's main leader and Java Champion, asking for ways to improve the conference next year and how we can get the word out about it so more people will attend. There were several good suggestions, and you've just read part of my solution to the question.

DevNexus was a great conference and well worth the cost (just $185 for the whole thing) so start planning to attend next year; you'll be happy you did. BTW, the price is set so that the costs of the conference are just about covered; this is not a 'for profit' venture, it's part of the way that AJUG works to build the Atlanta Java community. If you want to get involved, start attending the monthly meetings (they're free) and see what you've been missing out on.

If you were there, or wished you were, and have something you'd like to share then please leave a comment.  

Thanks for your attention,

Burk

A Weekend full of Learning

Where do you find people who willingly spend their entire weekend learning about things like Java class loaders, Groovy, Java Server Faces, Google Web Toolkit, Test Driven Development, Alternative languages for the JVM, and other similar topics? Well, last weekend you’d have found about two hundred of them at the 2008 Greater Atlanta Software Symposium put on by No Fluff Just Stuff.

The conference started Friday at 1PM and ended Sunday at 6PM, with breaks for food and sleep. The primary draw was twelve 90-minute opportunities to learn about one of 72 topics being presented by some of the best speakers out there including people like David Geary, Scott Davis, Neal Ford, and Ted Neward.

And if that weren’t enough (Is it ever?), each day had an extra goody; on Friday Jared Richardson presented a potentially life-changing keynote titled "Career 2.0" (keep an eye out for the book), Saturday ended with a choice of BOFs, and Sunday's lunch was followed by an hour-long “expert panel” featuring seven of the speakers holding forth on topics like architecture, testing and SOA.

If you’ve never heard of No Fluff Just Stuff then you’re in for a treat. It’s kind of like a traveling, three-day long, JavaOne. I recommend checking out their web site for a time and place when they’re either someplace near you or someplace you want to visit, then sign up and get ready to learn. It's good for your career.