Wearing my red fedora - GeeCon and 33rd Degree

I usually don't write posts summarizing conferences, because I assume that nobody cares what I think about given event. ;) This time however I decided to write a summary of the most important topics from these two biggest Java gigs in Poland from the perspective of the Red Hatter. I know at least few folks interested in this kind of review ;) .

First of all both 33rd Degree and GeeCon are very similar. Really. Both events take place in the same venue (which is really cool BTW - I love conferences in the cinemas). I even got problem recognizing during which conference I've been talking to whom. However it doesn't really matter as I enjoyed GeeCon as much as 33rd Degree :) .

The most interesting stuff from the perspective of the guy working on daily basis with the Fuse middleware:

Microservices

Buzz-busters will eat me alive for this, but I must say it. Microservices are becoming really popular. You may argue that microservcies are new ESB, say platitudes like "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" or just hate microservices with passion. You can't deny however that microservices are starting to become the big thing in the industry right now. I'm particularly interested in this topic as my recent open source love, Fabric8, is a kind of devOps swiss knife where we support microservices as a first-class citizen.

BTW If you got a chance to listen to Thoughtworks' Sam Newman talking about microservices, do it. Believe me, his talk is worth your time :) .

Spring Boot

If you are Spring hater, please stop reading now. Spring holds really big piece of the market share for application frameworks in the Java world. IMHO you need to be a friend to the Spring to get wider adoption of your Java software. Just as we are in Fabric8. Some things to remember in the context of the Spring:

• Spring XML is dead
• long live @Configuration
• long live Groovy
• IMHO Spring will be basically equal to Spring Boot pretty soon. Don't bother with your lousy custom configuration wiring code - migrate to Spring Boot and make your life easier.

Keep also in mind that not only Thoughtworks and Red Red promotes microservices approach to the architecture. Pivotal is shouting "microservices are cool" at you as well.

Java 8

Sometimes I also can't believe this, but yeah, Java 8 is here and it rocks. Please make our world a better place and adopt it. BTW Apparently Java 7 can be perceived as a minimal version of Java right now. That's good, because we require Java 7 in the latest Fabric8 as well :) .

Docker

We love Docker at Red Hat. Fabric8 loves Docker as well. I think that the majority of the industry still doesn't realize how big thing Docker is. Docker should be at your list of the technologies you need to learn in 2014. Docker plays nicely with the microservices approach. And as in the case of the micoservices, many big players started to adopt it (Red Hat, Google, Pivotal, Thoughtworks to name a few).

Vert.x

This is my personal TODO. Vert.x looks really promising and I'm ashamed I don't know it yet. This is project definitely worth to mention in this post as it is supported and promoted by Red Hat. Vert.x is pretty good candidate to take a piece of market share from Spring. And not only Spring, because Vert.x is a polyglot framework and therefore not limited to JVM.