JavaLand 2014 - CfP Statistics And Answers To Common Questions

You probably have heard about the new upcoming Java centered conference in Germany next year. JavaLand 2014 will open its gates for two days. So make sure you are around when this new conference will become the hub of the German Java developer scene. I'm proudly part of the conference organizers and as a program chair I get plenty of help from the awesome program committee which was recruited out of the German JUG umbrella called iJUG.

With every new conference or thing to happen people start asking questions. Until the final schedule isn't published and the first conference is run, most of it is unanswered. But I like to give you a solid first set of impressions about the conference. The following charts and arts are generated based on the more than 400(!) paper submissions we got during the official CfP! It is intended to give you a first impression but will probably not completely reflect the finished conference schedule which will be out shortly (expected: mid November).

The Topics - An Overview

First of all I tweeted a Wordle about the submitted topics.
Basically a broad mix around Java. It is quite interesting to see, that there is quite a bit of Spring in there and JavaFX absolutely was among the big topics. It was good to see, that JVM based languages also got some love because this conference is intended to host different topics around the JVM as a runtime and as such give exposure to all the different JVM languages also. Enterprise and Mobile together with different DevOps topics are spread among the place. If you look carefully you see some German in it. As of today we don't know the ratio between German and English talks. But given the fact that we got a good number of international proposals I expect it to play a role. We basically don't focus on either one. As long as there is good content in it.

Proposed Talks from 18 Different Countries
Overall we got proposals from mostly Europe and the States. In total 18 different countries. Which is amazing! A big "Thank you!" to all the submitters!

What role does Oracle play?
Next big question is what role does Oracle play in all that. The conference is organized by German Oracle User Group (DOAG) and many suspect any (probably unfair) Oracle involvement. The only thing I can reply to it is: There isn't anything wrong going on here. Oracle actually IS supporting this conference along the lines they did before with the annual DOAG Conference and Exhibition. Given the fact, that the DOAG Conference will be hosting less and less Java over the next years Oracle was given the chance to submit talks. Like anybody else could. Additionally they host program committee meetings in their locations. Which was incredibly kind of them. That is great support for the German Java Community!
The overall ratio Oracle vs. Non-Oracle talks in the CfP was 6:94 ... Yes, only 6 out of 100 talks were proposed by Oracle employees. This is not a typical Oracle conference ratio. If you compare the numbers I published from last year's JavaOne the Oracle Speakers take up to 30%.

What will the content look like?
A great question. We don't know yet. The last PC meeting will happen shortly but what I can tell you is how the overall distribution looks like according to the submitted proposals:

Comparable evenly distributed. Except that we got too less security submissions. But at least some good ones. I expected to see more JVM languages talks but the feedback we're taking here is that we did a bad job communicating the focus correctly. We'll try to correct this. We're beginners here. Please be patient ;)

What about the Rest?
There is plenty of stuff upcoming. We are hosting a complete scheduled conference and plan on different community centered activities around it. We also will have some other surprises in stock. Announcements are pending but will follow shortly. Best is to follow @iJUGeV or @myfear on Twitter to stay up to date.

Can I book? Where? How? How much?
Sure you can. The registration is open since a couple of days already. Going for a registration until the 01/31/2014 you get the non-iJUG member price for €250/day. If you're an iJUG Member you get it for €200/day! Which both is nothing!
Find all the details on the registration page. I'm looking forward meeting you there! If you have additional questions feel free to ask! I'll try to answer!

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New Article in German iX Magazine: CapeDwarf

Another article hit the road today. This time a comprehensive introduction to CapeDwarf which is Red Hat's Google App Engine implementation for AS 7. In German iX Magazine 11/2013.

Flexible 

CapeDwarf tries to bring Google's App Engine to JBoss AS7

Red Hat's CapeDwarf project tries to bring two well-established technologies together: Google App Engine and Red Hat's Java EE server AS 7. The aim of the project is to implement all the APIs that Google App Engine provides and make them available on the application server.

This is a German article and you can either grab the latest issue online or buy it at your favorite kiosk.

Find some other articles of mine by searching this blog for posts labeled "article" and you get some results.

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Review: "TestNG Beginner's Guide" by Varun Menon

Packt was so kind to send me another book to look at. I've always been curious about testing in general and I was looking for some good stuff to hand to co-workers or otherwise interested people to get started with TestNG.

Abstract

Unit/Functional testing has now become part of every development life cycle. Junit was once the main framework that was used by developers for the purpose of Unit testing when it came to Java. But Junit had certain limitations in terms of execution and features. This book explains about the features and usage of TestNg, a new framework that overcomes Junit’s limitations and provides a lot of extra features.
TestNg Beginner’s Guide is a practical, hands-on guide that aims to increase your knowledge of TestNg. This step-by-step guide will help you to learn and understand the different TestNg features, and you will learn about the advantages and how to use and configure each feature according to your needs.

Book: TestNG Beginner's Guide
Language: English
Paperback: 276 pages [ 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches]
Release Date: July 26, 2013
ISBN-10: 1782166009
ISBN-13: 978-1782166009

About the Author
Varun Menon is a QA consultant with several years of experience in developing automation frameworks on various technologies and languages such as Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and Groovy. He has worked on web and mobile applications for some of the leading clients in the field of supply chain management, online photo books, video analytics, and market research.

The Content
Chapter one gives a brief introduction about testing and test automation. How to get started with TestNG, where to get it from and how to integrate it into your favorite IDE. Eclipse is used throughout the book. Chapter two deals with the basic configuration and introduces test suites and the command prompt usage. It also adds a couple of tests for packages, classes and methods. Chapter three is all about annotations. Setup and destroy, disabling tests and how to use parameterization. Test groups are introduced in chapter four followed by adding dependencies in chapter five. Chapter six and seven deal with the factory annotation and parallelism in tests. Chapter eight gives an overview about build tool integration covering Ant and Maven. Logging and reporting about test runs is covered in chapter nine. Programmatic test creation is covered in chapter ten. A basic migration scenario is covered in chapter 11. The closing chapter deals with the differences between unit and functional testing and explains additional concepts like JMock, Mockito and how to use Selenium.

Writing and Style
Generally the instructions are clear and the screen-shots are helpful. The overall level of detail and mixed in complexity is appropriate. Overall an easy read and well structured. Great for beginners and even developers familiar with the topic could still use it as a reference.

Conclusion and recommendation
The book is aimed at introducing developers to TestNG. It uses numerous screenshots and code listings to introduce core features. and only requires basic Java and probably JUnit knowledge. The book is aimed at Java developers who are unfamiliar with TestNG. If you're completely new to testing and TestNG in particular it is worth a read. One trade off is the very basic style of the examples. Additionally it does not tell you about why to use that feature or when to use another.

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Travel Report: JavaOne 2013 - Back To Glory

I'm back since a few days already and needed to catch up with all the things which had been on hold for the last couple of days. It was the busiest time of the year for me. A complete week of JavaOne and OpenWorld in San Francisco. A very brief travel report.

Annual ACED Briefing

Many of you know that I am part of Oracle's Community Recognition Program called the "ACE Program". I get asked a lot about it. Especially because it seems as if I am working closer with Java EE and Open Source than with the Oracle Products. But this is not necessarily true. Anyway, the ACEs get a once-a-year chance of personally talking to Product Management and learn about the upcoming things early. This includes many of the upcoming announcements at OOW and J1. The ACE Briefing usually happens the last two days of the week before the conferences start in SF. Because of the many different professions among the ACEs it covers a broad mix of topics scratching nearly every bit of the Oracle product portfolio, from Engineered Systems to Linux, the DB, Middleware and Java. If you want a recap on everything you'd better re-watch the keynotes held at OpenWorld. They are available on the media network in the meantime. For me personally the best part of the briefing is catching up with the peers from all over the world. Even if the group is growing year by year there are many familiar faces. After working with them throughout the year, a beer and a chat makes all that a bit more personal. Thank you Roland, Vikki, Lillian for making that possible. But it is not all fun and games. The Friday also held some Customer Advisory Board activities and other meetings. Reedwood is generally a perfect place to meet Oracle people in person and move stuck things around. Email isn't personal communication and this is even more true for foreigners like me. If there is one thing that makes traveling valuable it is exactly that. Gathering some intercultural knowledge and try to fix things that broke over email or other text based communications over the year. Friday evening it was time to move to the big city. San Francisco was waiting and the illustrious group moved into the Hilton on Union-Square. The place to be for the next few days. It also is the main hotel for JavaOne and I was surprised to not see much decoration in place already. To me it seemed as if this was different to last year. But, everything gets closer to just-in-time .. why not that part also.

JavaOne vs. OpenWorld - Balancing Worlds

My personal challenge is to balance activities between the two conferences happening. I want to catch up with Product Management but I'm also interested in meeting the peers in the Java space. Unlike the last years I decided to not spend to much energy on walking back and forth between the two conferences but basically stick around the JavaOne hotels. Given that my sessions and panels were more or less evenly distributed over the whole time I had preps to do every day and also wanted to see some talks. Being part of the JavaOne content committee actually helped getting in every session I liked without having to be enrolled for them. It feels good to see that the tremendous amount of work which goes into voting and commenting on proposals finally pays of and gets recognized. As Adam Bien put it: "the advisory board did a great job this year". Thank you Adam. I felt the same. An insane amount of sessions I would actually have enjoyed to listen too. The most interesting ones exactly parallel to my own sessions. The good news is, that all the sessions got recorded and will be available on Parleys in very short time. Another interesting observation was, that most of the PMs I would love to talk to showed up at JavaOne. There basically was no need to run around to catch everybody. They've been all around JavaOne also. Generally the days of the conference seems to be a never ending day with a packed schedule for everybody. Saying hello mostly is ok. Sitting down for a longer chat is a rare pleasure for many.

Meeting Peers - Names - Rock-stars - People.

But the sheer amount of names you ran into is astonishing. Personally I don't believe in Rock-Star-Hero kind of things. What I learned about the Java community is, that there are incredible intelligent individuals out there which do amazing things with the technology they love. I've only rarely meet someone who wouldn't want to chat with me at all or makes me feel like I am not worth talking to. Thankfully this is a big exception and everybody running around at JavaOne is like you and me. I ran into Arun, Peter, John, Geertjan, Alexander, Uwe, Venkat, Lincoln, Ray, Andrew.... All have been there. And they've been like you and me. Drinking beer, preparing sessions and chatting with  peers they've not met in a long time. That is what JavaOne actually is for.

Setting the Stage - The best one so far
The content was amazing. So many great topics presented by gifted speakers. Packed sessions and a keynote which came back to Moscone for the first time in years. No-one could any longer assume that Oracle isn't listening. It simply takes some time to turn big things around. But it is possible. And the community is driving that change by being interested, committed and providing their criticism and ideas for improvements.

JavaOne Keynote back in Moscone (Picture: B.Borges)

I'm proudly wearing my JavaOne t-shirt today. It was a great show. And the biggest news has been, that there aren't any. The Internet-Of-Things is driving a lot of the future and the alignment of the programming models across all platforms beginning with Java 8 are both things that are the essence from the presented strategy. After this incredible week it is hard to let the work takeover again. But that is what is next. Thanks to everybody who stopped by and said hello. Thanks for being part of that incredible event. For me it has been the best one so far and I'm looking forward to the next year.

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