Last week, from October 17th to 20th, something really amazing happened: the return of JavaOne.
For a short context: JavaOne used to be the main Java conference in the world until it was “shut down” in 2017 and was replaced by Oracle Code One starting in 2018.
To be honest, I really thought that the event was gone forever. But, in the first half of this year, we got the great news: JavaOne was coming back.
Being the first event where I ever gave an international talk, I couldn’t be more excited about it!
But, we started this “revival” journey with three major updates:
- It has moved from San Francisco/CA to Las Vegas/NV: which, by the way, was a nice change!
- The whole event would be much “smaller” compared to what we’ve been used to: I’ve seen the same in other events that are coming back after the pandemic hiatus;
- There was no Call for Papers: as the event is so much smaller, Oracle worked directly with both Java Champions and JUG Leaders communities to build a session catalog.
In this post, I’ll share my impressions about it. Maybe it would be helpful, especially if you intended to be there but couldn’t make it (the reality for a lot of people).
Day 0 – Java Leaders Summit
The event inside the event. This is where Java leaders from all over the world get together to discuss the latest news about Java and, of course, its future.
The meeting started with the recognition of the fifty new Java Champions of the last two years:
Then we moved to some cool discussions:
- Java 19 summary, led by Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro
- Language Futures, led by Gavin Bierman
- Project Loom, led by Ron Pressler
- Java in Education, led by Heather Stephens
The great about those discussions is not only that we have the opportunity to ask Oracle directly about whatever we want relating to the topics above but also listen to some of the most brilliant Java experts giving their own considerations about the same subjects.
We ended the meeting, of course, with a super nice picture:
Day #1 – We are back
“Welcome back!”. That’s how Georges Saab started the JavaOne keynote, followed by a super nice talk from Sonar Source’s CEO, Olivier Gaudin.
Usually, the sponsor talks are “sales, sales, sales”. But not this one! He delivered really interesting and technical content.
Back to the stages, Georges showed an interesting picture showing the Open JDK contributors breakdown:
So, the top 3 contributors of JDK 19 per organization were:
- Oracle
- Red Hat
- Independent
The last part of the keynote was led by the “Mr. Java Community”, Sharat Chander. He started by showing some pretty much interesting numbers about the Java community around the globe:
For the sake of highlight:
- 10 million Java Developers
- 360+ JUGs
- 1 million Java Certifications
- 355 Java Champions
I don’t think there is a larger community ecosystem in other technology. Is there?
The last (but absolutely not least) thing worthy of mentioning about the keynote was a very special moment.
Oracle created a lifetime recognition given to someone who dedicated the biggest part of his own life to the Java community:
Yes! Our very own Bruno “Javaman” Souza received this unique recognition at the stage of JavaOne 2022:
What a moment, folks! What a moment…
The one last stuff that I really want to highlight from Day #1 is the amazing talks from Paul Bakker, a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. With tons of developers trying to do what Netflix is doing (usually in a pointless manner), his talk “How Netflix really uses Java” was enlightening (I wish it was recorded).
Day #2 – Technical keynote, JCP party, and… time to talk!
JavaOne usually has three keynotes: the opening keynote, the technical keynote, and the community keynote.
So, Day #2 was the Technical Keynote day.
It started with Julia Liuson, President Developer Division, and GitHub from Microsoft, which talked about what they have been doing to enhance Java developers’ experience within the Microsoft ecosystem.
One interesting (and even surprising to some people) point that she talked about was some cloud offers that they have through Azure. I think this image talks for itself:
After she delivered some cool insights, we had at the stage the amazing Mark Heckler, Java Champion and Principal Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft.
He did a demo showing how to use many of the Microsoft tools integrated to provide scalability and security to your apps.
Next, Chad Arimura walked back to the stage to invite some of his peers to talk about some of the main topics in the Java world today:
- Gavin Bierman, for a Project Amber update
- Mikael Vidstedt, for a ZGC update
- Sean Mullan, for a Platform Security update
- Ron Pressler and Tomas Langer, for a Project Loom update
- Denys Makogon, straight from Ukraine, for an F1 Simulator video
Two major takeaways from this last section:
- Tomas Langer’s demo about Project Loom showed that it’s not only about performance, but also code readability;
- Denys Makogon showing up on the stage, from Ukraine, even from a recorded video, sent us a strong message about hope and resilience (even though the topic was Java and F1).
Now talking a little bit about myself, it was my turn to present something.
Well, not “my” turn, but “our” turn, as I have the honor to present a tutorial with the great Ana-Maria Mihalceanu, a Java Champion Alumni, former Red Hatter, and now a Senior Developer Advocate for Oracle.
We explored the best practices and tools for resource management with Kubernetes. Quarkus, of course, was the Java platform chosen to do it (if we are talking about resource management, what better than using something that does it from its very own roots?).
To end the day we had the classical JCP Annual Party, on its 22nd edition:
It was a great opportunity to get together with some friends!
Day #3 – Community Keynote, final sessions, and… done!
The final day has come, and it was a very special one for me.
For the first time ever I had the opportunity (and the honor) to participate in the Java Community Keynote!
They invited me, Mala Gupta, and Mohammed Aboullaite to talk about our experiences with communities. What a better topic?! 🙂
I didn’t have an idea of how much production is involved in putting together something like this.
I had the opportunity to share some of the community activities I organized with my friends from SouJava:
And the experience was amazing!
And talking about SouJava, our JUG had two members on the stage: Bruno Souza, and me! 🙂
Though the Community Keynote was over… the event was not.
I still had two sessions to present, and one of them was in the very last slot of the day!
First, I talked about how you can make your Java code up to sixty times faster by using native images. The core of this presentation was to explore what is a native image, how you can use it, when you should use it, and when you should not.
Next, coincidentally in the same room, I had the opportunity to share the stage with my good friend, Rodrigo Graciano, to talk about batch processing in the cloud using Spring Batch and Kubernetes (Openshift).
Aaaaand… it’s a wrap! Phew… 🙂
The feeling of being part of this return was amazing! If I would mention my main takeaways from this JavaOne, they would be:
- We are back!
- Yes, it could be bigger. But I get why it was not this year. Maybe the next one?
- I missed a lot of big companies that used to be at JavaOne. Hope they are back in 2023;
- The Java community is stronger than ever.
What do you think about the return of JavaOne? Leave your comments down below.