Last week, I visited Java Forum Nord, a new conference with 150 participants and 21 talks. It took place in Hannover, Germany. In my understanding, it has been the first regional conference this size and I very much like the thought it hasn’t been the last. It was a very nice and (for me) informative conference. I want to thank the organizers for their work and also the speakers for the great lineup. The location right in the center of Hannover has been as awesome as the food.

This is the first of a series of articles. These articles are my notes from this event and serve as a cheat sheet when I want to develop further knowledge about one of these topics in the future. They could also be helpful for developers who didn’t attend the conference.

Keynote by Adam Bien

Adam Bien presented one of the most dynamic keynotes I ever saw. He is a great speaker and fired quite a few polarizing but well-thought statements like machine gun fire. I like that! He made clear that Java is a really popular language. In fact it is listed as number one language in the TIOBE index for october 2015. On Github, the amount of projects using Java rises since years. Adam sees the reasons for this in the maturity of the language. It’s old enough so developers can find enough resources and simple enough to get things done. An interesting thought of his is that the best metric for a language is: How fast can you overcome barriers of the language and get business problems solved? Creating a Java project in these days is very easy, just make a new Maven project, add support for your favorite framework and go on solving business problems. This is what Adam means with “new pragmatism” and “fast, lean and straight”.

Also an interesting thought: “best of breed” tools and frameworks, that is the most modern and fancy stuff that’s around, is not necessary the best choice for solving business problems. They could die before growing old enough to be mainstream.

One of the most important issues with Java these days is modularization both in Java applications (for example microservices vs fat client) as well as in the JRE itself (project jigsaw in Java 9). Adam is very strong against modularization of business applications where it makes no sense. “We ran a business application successfully for 3 years. Let’s use microservices and cut it into pieces! - Why?! It’s running just fine”. This topic is also an issue of Java 9 because project jigsaw targets to modularize the JRE itself. Adam is not a fan of that.

Because of the mentioned zoo of frameworks for Java, design patterns should not be implemented by an application developer but rather provided by the used framework like Spring. “There are no patterns any more, just platforms”. I have to mention that on my workshop on Design Patterns.

Oh yeah, here are his slides.

Other content of Java Forum Nord 2015

These are the talks I visited:

• Keynote by Adam Bien
• “Reflecting Software Architectures” by Stefan Zörner
• “Yes we scan - Software analysis with JQAssistant” by Dirk Mahler (blog post by Dirk Mahler himself)
• “Mastering legacy code in x simple steps” by Falk Sippach
• “Swimming upstream in the container revolution: Containerless Continuous Delivery” by Bert Jan Schrijver
• “Functional Programming in Java 8” by Nicole Rauch
• “Where has my software architecture gone?” by Oliver Gierke

TL;DR

I visited the great conference Java Forum Nord and will write about the talks I visited. Adam Bien gave a great keynote and talked about the reasons for the success of Java.