Starting off
On September 30th, the success-proven JAVA conference JUG Saxony Day started off with a great opening talk by Martin Duli, the Minister of Economics of Saxony. He spoke about the needs and enablers for an industry 4.0, innovation and digitalization, as well as important parts of his AIDA program.
This year’s conference was divided into five tracks: processes, enterprise technologies, java, architecture, and special topics. The Radisson Hotel in Dresden, Germany, offered a great location for many exciting presentations to over 400 developers from near and far. Over a dozen exhibitors and a whole hotel crew ensured a comfortable setting during the short breaks.
Danke mehr gibt es nicht zu sagen… volles Haus auf dem #jsd2016 pic.twitter.com/aWcG90ADdA
— JUG Saxony (@jugsaxony) September 30, 2016
It’s all about JDK 9
Starting with the keynote “Prepare for JDK 9!” my colleague Bastian and I visited all three very insightful Java talks by Oracle. The speakers, all Java project leaders, outlined the new features of JDK 9 and emphasized the final steps of the project roadmap until the final release in early 2017. Dalibor Topic provided a high level view, Wolfgang Weigand focused on the modularization (JSR 376) with Project Jigsaw (presentation), and Sean Coffey dived deeper into the technical implementation details of a variety of enhancements. An excerpt:
Modularization
- JEP 200: Modular JDK
- JEP 201: Reorganize the JDK source code into modules
- JEP 220: Introduce modular run-time images
- new runt-time image structure introduces conf dir, and removes libs like rt.jar or tools.jar
- jimage - list and extract modules
- JEP 260: Encapsulate most internal APIs
- no access to most internal APIs anymore (exception: sun.misc.Unsafe)
- jdeps inspects your project for such deprecated dependencies
- JEP 261: Implement the module system
- JEP 282: jlink and mlib - tools to assemble and optimize modules
Garbage collector
- JEP 158: Unified JVM Logging
- JEP 271: Unified GC Logging
- JEP 189: Reduce GC pause times
- JEP 248: G1 is now default
Other enhancements
- JEP 223: New versioning scheme for JDK
- JEP 247: Compile for older platform versions
- JEP 222: jshell in jdk9/bin - Finally there is a native REPL for Java, too!
- JEP 238: Include jar files with different versions in your project
- JEP 269: Introduce more convenience factory methods for collections
Further reads
- Platform news: blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group
- JDK 9: jdk9.java.net with EA Builds and all JEPs
- Cryptographic Roadmap
Our presentation
Bastian and I presented the ecosystem around our Elastic stack for test aggregation in the ePages delivery pipeline. Our talk focused not only on the business requirements and technical implementation itself but we also emphasized the cultural shift towards a DevOps culture with a Microservices architecture in our company. We slightly enhanced our slides compared to the talk at the Karlsruher Entwicklertag. The feedback from the participants was very positive and some developers talked with us afterwards – highly interested in implementing their own containerized project with Github, CircleCI and Docker Hub.
Our Elasticsearch cluster uses GitHub, CircleCI and Docker Hub for development and delivery
More talks
In other talks we gained profound insights into Kotlin (a better JVM language) and the Netflix OSS stack, which is also used in our Microservices architecture. Stefan Zörner gave the best talk with taking care of better software architecture documentation, where the arc42 template comes in handy.
Wir freuen uns über den "Besten Sprecher"-Preis für @StefanZoerner auf dem @jugsaxony Day #JSD2016 -- Folien hier: https://t.co/VkcmT0MoDd pic.twitter.com/OdePrtXWXv
— embarc (@embarced) October 4, 2016
Unfortunately, we missed the very much appreciated talk with workshop parts about brain patterns. Luckily, the session is also available in recorded format. Go ahead and watch it!
Danke, #JSD2016, Ihr wart ein tolles Publikum. Die #brainpatterns könnt Ihr hier nachlesen: https://t.co/YixAh1Xu6A inkl. Brain-O-Mat 🙂 pic.twitter.com/c401s1A2MH
— Julia Dellnitz (@learnical) September 30, 2016
Summary
We are very happy to have been part of such a well-organized conference. If you are a Java developer, we can totally recommend to make a big mark for this conference in your calendar for next year! See you there!
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