The Scandinavian Developer Conference (aka ScanDev, aka SDC) 2013 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden on March 4-6. The conference was held at the conference center for Gothia Towers, the largest hotel in Sweden. For those of you not familiar with it, ScanDev is the premier IT conference in the Gothenburg region. It has tracks for product/team management, architecture, UI/UX, testing, data, C/C++, .NET, Java, mobile, JavaScript and PHP. The Java EE presence was particularly strong at the conference. Besides me, Aslak Knutsen and Dan Allen had a talk about Arquillian, David Blevins spoke on TomEE and Kai Wahner had his excellent Java integration frameworks talk. I attended all three talks. I also attended a few talks on Java SE, REST/hypermedia, NoSQL, HTML 5/JavaScript and mobile. It was great to catch up personally with Dan, Aslak and David.
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 well attended. The slides for the talk are here:
On a cool, crisp Saturday morning, I decided to go island hopping across the Southern Gothenburg Archipelago. In the old Norse sagas, these islands were called Elfarsker (the river islets) and today they are a car free paradise (you read that right - there are no cars allowed on the islands). I visited Branno, Styrso and Donso. With picturesque trails and shorelines reminiscence of some of the more desolate parts of the rocky Maine coast, this is a true gem for any outdoors/nature enthusiast. On my 8+ hour hike, I came across perhaps 4-5 people including folks on the ferry to/from the city of Gothenburg proper. Just take a look at some the pictures I took below:
I liked the conference as well as the city of Gothenburg and look forward to going there again.