jLuger.de - 14. Java Forum Stuttgart

Yesterday I was at the 14. Java Forum Stuttgart in (surprise) Stuttgart, Germany.  It was organized by the java user group stuttgart. They did a great job. You could attend seven talks and choose each time between six different ones making up 42 talks in total. There was also a lobby where exhibitors showed their products or presented them as possible employers. Around that they offered coffee, non-alcoholics, snacks and lunch for free. All that for a modest price of 150 EUR (including tax).

I've visited the following talks:

Phaser volle Energie, eine Reise ins Paralleluniversum von JDK7
Hartmut Lang introduced the Phaser and the JoinForkPool classes of the new JDK 7and gave examples when to use them. As he stayed very focused he could deliver detailed information.

Concurrency-Paradigmen
The second talk was about concurrency paradigm. Roman Roelofsen introduced why we need to know about concurrency and presented solutions/frameworks for different languages (all JVM based). As he had a broader scope he could give only a rough idea and his samples were very simple.

Both talks filled their rooms but they didn't got the biggest ones. I think concurrency seems to be a topic for developers but there are obviously hotter ones.

Muss die Automatisierung von Java GUI Tests fehlschlagen?
The third talk was after a short pause and handled Java GUI testing. Reginald Stadlbauer told about basic requirements for a GUI testing tool. While talking a lot about do's and don'ts he didn't present a working solution. On one side this was good as the is running a company that sells a GUI testing tool. So this didn't get an advertising show. But I was curious and asked in the lunch time for a demonstration at the exhibition stand. Their tool Squish is pretty amazing. It records real code so that you can easily add testing code or reuse it. So on the other side it was bad that he hadn't shown it.
What was notable on this talk was the fact that there were people listening as it didn't cover web apps but real desktop applications. OK, it was the smallest room that I was in during this conference but it was totally filled.

Android Programmierung leichtgemacht
Lars Vogel introduced on how to program an android app. The cool thing about this talk was that he didn't not only present some facts on slide shows but also created a small real world application along the way.

Ergonomisches UI Design - das lass mal den Grafiker machen
Alexander Klein gave some general rules and tips and tricks on how to design a GUI. They weren't bad (I have heard/seen them somewhere else) but of the kind easy to break difficult to follow. As good as the guidelines were they just help you to not create bad user interfaces. Not bad doesn't mean awesome or rocking. You still need to get experts to create rocking user interfaces but thats what sales need.

RESTful APIs - warum REST mehr als http und XML ist
Dr. Stefan Schlott presented a way to design a API based on HTTP and URIs. Thanks to a small shop example the talk was pretty informative for me.

Was man aus den Top 5 Web 2.0 Performance Problemen anderer lernen kann
Here I expected what problems large web 2.0 companies had with their servers. It turned out that Andreas Grabner told on how to create a website/use JavaScript so that it is rendered really fast in the browser of the user. So at first I was a little bit disappointed but he told us about some really nasty performance pitfalls. That turned it into a very interesting talk.