JAX London is over for another year and many of the community developers I know are suffering withdrawal symptoms from such an intense few days. With two days of talks and a whole day of workshops my head is bursting with new ideas.

I met lots of interesting new people from all over the place, asked some challenging questions of some great speakers and community leaders, got some great books and a couple of JAX London tshirts for my collection

Going Mobile

Ted Neward gave me a great kick-start to Android development and pairing with the diabolical developer helped cement my understanding. He was not so diabolical after all, maybe its just an act !

Software development is rarely straight forward, but with a couple of downloads from the Android developer site and a USB cable from my Ubuntu laptop to my Samsung Galaxy II Android phone I was soon testing out my first app.

The android development tools are really easy to use and do all the build and deploy work for you. The only issue I got stuck on was having an android virtual device and real device (my phone) up and running at the same time. Using an Android virtual device (AVD) you can have your own test platform, its one way to see the latest Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android.

Java is dead! Java is the new COBOL!

Like every technology pronounced dead, the Java platform lives on and is stronger than ever. From the keynote by James Governor, analyst at RedMonk, the respect and value of the Java platform remains alive and well across the industry. It very valuable to get objective feedback from an analysts who understands how the world sees us.

A comment on twitter suggested Java is the new COBOL, which seemed to go against the positive outlook the industry has on Java. However when you consider that COBOL has a huge codebase and drives value to a vast amout of organisation in the world then that is a comparison I can appreciate. I am not sure that was the meaning of the original post though :)

Software Craftsmanship

Sandro Mancuso treated us to some valuable lessons on the reality of software development. I dont know of any teams which have avoided a degree of technical debt, the lucky ones having a well understood and decreasing level. If you value your career, job satisfaction and sanity then software craftsmen practices are invaluable.

Jason Gorman also pitched in with a reminder of all the project evidence that showed that quick and dirty is really “slow and dirty”. Without an appreciation for quality in your code, the quick and dirty approach will bite you in the arse much sooner than you thought!

Continuous deployment - a bridge too far?

If you want to see how effective your organisation really is, then attempting to move towards a continuous development approach will give you all the information you wanted - and a whole heap more that you didnt!

When something as simple to prevent as a full hard drive can cause your company share price to fall then you know there are lots of issues to manage when you create and deploy your own software. By visualising all these issues using wallboards and openly showing the issues within and across roles, you get the opportunity to improve the way you get things done. I learnt a great deal by giving a talk on this topic and am thankful for all the poignant questions I received from the audience.

See the Ultimate Wallboard submissions for over 80 ideas on how to visualise your work.

Networking

We are all busy people so the great think about JAX London is the opportunity to talk to some many people in one place, whilst they are way from project deadlines. Its a great opportunity to ask questions and learn unexpected things. Thanks to everyone I talked to, especially my colleagues in the London Java Community.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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I was lucky enough to be invited to the Java  7 launch party at the Oracle UK headquaters the other week. It was good to see so much community involvement with the launch which helped set aside some of the concerns raised regarding Oracles appreciation of the community around Java, after a bit of a uncertain times during the merger.

Read More

Here is a summary of the last weeks events at the London Java community, Graduate Developer community, DevTank, The London Lean Startup group and the Limited WIP Society.

Read More

Here is an update of events happening that may be of interest to developers in London. There is also a summary of the events I went to last week, in case you missed any of them.

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On Saturday 27th November the London java Community ran their our third conference in two years. The conference was a great success and was sold out, with lots of people on the wait list who didn’t manage to sign up in time.

| LJC Conference site | meetup page (feedback) |

Everyone managed to weather through the winter morning and get there in plenty of time to mingle and warm up for the day ahead.  It was good to have some time to chat about what we wanted to get from the day and there was a great buzz built up before the start of the talks.

The first talk by Martijn Verberg and Ben Evans on the future of Java was great, it is alway good to have pair presenting and these pair did a great job of entertaining and at the same time educating the crowd.  A fluffy Duke mascot was used to good effect.

I enjoyed running a test driven development workshop aimed at those with no TDD experience or just getting started. Using the information I am building up about TDD on my “tooling up” website, the attendees all said they were confident about starting TDD and so I was pleased I reached my goal.

I hope to run some Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development workshops sometime in 2011.

Whist I was running the TDD workshop, there were some very insightful discussions going on at the “Future of Java parkbench” session, with some really interesting information about the internal workings of the Java Virtual Machine.  Maybe someone who was there will do a little write up??

Other highlights for me included:

• John Smart’s talk on Hudson CI and continuous deployment
• Steve Elliot from Oracle covering the roadmap for Java 7 and 8
• Martijn Verberg’s Diabolical Developer
• Markus Kobler on avoiding technical bankruptcy
• VisionOn.tv talking about their open source project to make open media work better - they showed a few short film clips too!

Have a look at the list of sessions to get a full view on what went on.

There were some great discussions going on after the conference in the pub down the road and it was great to reflect on the great things we learn and divising some plans for LJC events in the new year.

I hope to work more with the VisionOn.tv project in 2011 as it looks very interesting and is very community oriented.

Thanks to all that came and made the day so special as well as a big thank you to all the other organisers.

@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket