Oredev had its seventh annual conference in the city of Malmo,
Sweden last week. The name "Oredev" signifies to the part that Malmo
is connected with Copenhagen with Oresund
bridge.
There were about 1000 attendees with several speakers from all over
the world. The first two days were hands-on workshops and the next
three days were sessions. There were different tracks such as Java,
Windows 8, .NET, Smart Phones, Architecture, Collaboration, and
Entrepreneurship. And then there was Xtra(ck) which had interesting
sessions not directly related to technology.
I gave two slide-free talks in the Java track. The first one showed
how to build an end-to-end Java EE 6 application using NetBeans and
GlassFish. The complete instructions to build the application are
explained in detail
here. This 3-tier application used Java Persistence API,
Enterprsie Java Beans, Servlet, Contexts and Dependency Injection,
JavaServer Faces, and Java API for RESTful Services. The source code
built during the application can be downloaded here (LINK TBD).
The second session, slide-free again, showed how to take a Java EE 6
application into production using GlassFish cluster. It explained:
Create a 2-instance GlassFish cluster
Front-end with a Web server and a load balancer
Demonstrate session replication and fail over
Monitor the application using JavaScript
The complete instructions for this session are available
here.
Oredev has an interesting way of collecting attendee feedback. The
attendees drop a green, yellow, or red card in a bucket as they walk
out of the session. Not everybody votes but most do. Other than the
instantaneous feedback provided on twitter, this mechanism provides
a more coarse grained feedback loop as well. The first talk had
about 67 attendees (with 23 green and 7 yellow) and the second one
had 22 (11 green and 11 yellow).
The speakers' dinner is a good highlight of the conference. It is
arranged in the historic
city hall and the mayor welcomed all the speakers. As you can
see in the pictures, it is a very royal building with lots of
history behind it. Fortunately the dinner was a buffet with a much
better variety unlike last year where only black soup and geese were
served, which was quite cultural BTW ;-)
The sauna in 85F, skinny dipping in 35F ocean and alternating
between them at Kallbadhus is always very Swedish. Also spent a
short evening at a friend's house socializing with other
speaker/attendees, drinking Glogg, and
eating Pepperkakor.
The welcome packet at the hotel also included cinnamon rolls,
recommended to drink with cold milk, for a little more taste of
Swedish culture.
Something different at this conference was how artists from Image Think were visually
capturing all the keynote speakers using images on whiteboards. Here
are the images captured for Alexis
Ohanian (Reddit co-founder and now running Hipmunk):
Unfortunately I could not spend much time engaging with other
speakers or attendees because was busy preparing a new hands-on lab
material. But was able to spend some time with Matthew Mccullough,
Micahel Tiberg, Magnus Martensson, Mattias Karlsson, Corey Haines,
Patrick Kua, Charles Nutter, Tushara, Pradeep, Shmuel, and several
other folks.
Here are a few pictures captured from the event:
And the complete album here:
Thank you Matthias, Emily, and Kathy for putting up a great show and
giving me an opportunity to speak at Oredev. I hope to be back next
year with a more vibrant representation of Java - the language and
the ecosystem!
