DevNexus 2013 was held in historic Atlanta on February 18-19. For those of you not familiar with it, DevNexus is the most significant Java conference in the South Eastern US. It was started by JBoss Java Champion Burr Sutter and organized by the Atlanta JUG (currently lead by Vincent Mayers, Gunnar Hillert, et al). As usual DevNexus attracted a bevy of world class speakers including Ben Evans, Neal Ford, David Geary and Venkat Subramaniam. Topics included Java SE, NoSQL, mobile, cloud, HTML5/JavaScript and of course Java EE :-).
On the first day of the conference, I presented my session on Java EE titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". The talk is primarily along the same lines as Arun Gupta's JavaOne 2012 technical keynote. I covered the changes in JMS 2, the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356), the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), JAX-RS 2, JPA 2.1, JTA 1.2, JSF 2.2, Java Batch, Bean Validation 1.1, Java EE Concurrency and the rest of the APIs in Java EE 7. I also briefly talked about the possible contents of Java EE 8. The talk was received well and I had some pretty good discussions during Q & A. It was a completely full house session with standing room only! The slides for the talk are here:
To my delight, the DevNexus folks were very interested in my NoSQL/Java EE talk (titled "Using NoSQL with JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE"). The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surpringly little material on out there. The talk has four parts -- a brief overview of JPA 2.1, a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. This talk was also a full house, the Q & A was excellent and I got great feedback afterwards. The slides for the talk are here:
The first demo used MongoDB, JPA, EclipseLink NoSQL and JUnit. The code for it is available on this GitHub repository: https://github.com/m-reza-rahman/jpa-nosql-demo. The second demo used MongoDB, CDI, Arquillian and JUnit. The code for it is available on this GitHub repository: https://github.com/m-reza-rahman/cdi-nosql-demo. Give me a shout if you need help getting the demos up and running. I plan to write a two-part blog using the contents of this talk, so stay tuned.
Besides giving my talks, I attended a few talks on Java SE, HTML 5/JavaScript and mobile. I definitely enjoyed DevNexus and hope to be part of the conference next year.