Java EE @ DevNexus 2018

DevNexus 2018 was held in historic Atlanta on February 21-23. For those of you not familiar with it, DevNexus is the most significant Java centric conference in the South Eastern US and now perhaps even at a national level. It was started by JBoss Java Champion Burr Sutter and organized by the Atlanta JUG (currently lead by Vincent Mayers, Pratik Patel, et al). I guess at this point I am somewhat of a DevNexus veteran myself. As usual DevNexus attracted a bevy of world class speakers including Ed Burns, Kito Mann, Sebastian Daschner, David Blevins, Ivar Grimstad, Rafael Benevides, Jeanne Boyarsky, Victor Orozco, Mohamed Taman, Roberto Cortez, Edson Yanaga and Enrique Zamudio. This was another solid year for DevNexus. Java EE had a strong showing at the conference as usual, including my own sessions.

I started the conference with my new all-day workshop titled "Pragmatic Microservices with Java EE and WildFly Swarm". I start the workshop with trying to do the right thing in explaining what microservices really are, what practical value they offer for most of us and when you should consider them (or not). The hands-on portion of the workshop starts with running a so-called "monolithic" Java EE application on Payara (my plan is to port this code over to WildFly). We then separate a small RESTful service out of the application (a so-called "microservice"). At this stage, the microservice is a simple vanilla Java EE thin war also running on Payara. We then discuss the pros and cons of Java EE thin wars vs. fat jars as well as WildFly Swarm. The next portion of the lab runs the microservice as a fat jar using WildFly Swarm. We finish the lab by discussing concepts such as Linux containers (e.g. Docker), dynamic discovery, health-check, metrics, retry/circuit-breakers/bulkheads and client-side load-balancing. We see these concepts in action using the more advanced features beyond fat jars that WildFly Swarm offers.

The slide deck I use for the workshop is below (click here if you can't see the embedded slide deck).

A webcast covering the more lecture-oriented parts of the workshop can be found here. The code and instructions for the workshop can be found on GitHub. I've deliberately designed the lab materials to be fairly self-guided so you can definitely use the lab materials on your own (or perhaps even run the lab in your own company/JUG) . You are always welcome to reach out to me when needed.

The next day in the afternoon I delivered my talk titled "Java EE 8 and Java EE 9 - What You Need to Know!". I discuss continued Java EE adoption, the importance of Java EE to the ecosystem, the contents of the Java EE 8 release as well as the opening up of Java EE through the Eclipse Foundation. I also talk about the key MicroProfile initiative that aims to bring a collaborative, fast-paced, vendor-neutral approach to microservices in the Java EE ecosystem. The heart of the talk covers the key features of Java EE 8 such as HTTP/2, a complete security API overhaul, even stronger JSON support, support for HTML 5 Server-Sent Events (SSE), CDI 2, Bean Validation 2 and Java SE 8 alignment. The current slides for the talk are below (click here if you can't see the embedded slide deck). Just as is the case for the lab, you are welcome to use the slide deck freely.

Later in the afternoon Ivar Grimstad did a deeper dive on MicroProfile. The same day Sebastian Daschner did a very cool talk on Cloud Native Java EE and Víctor Orozco did a talk on Java EE microservices.

The next day I volunteered at the Eclipse Foundation booth alongside Emily Jiang, David Blevins, Cesar Saavedra, Roberto Cortez and Ivar Grimstad. The booth featured both the MicroProfile and EE4J projects. Booth traffic was great and there was lots of interest in both projects. I finished the conference by attending Roberto's excellent talk featuring awesome demos of Java EE/MicroProfile on Raspberry Pis.

Overall this was another great year at DevNexus and I hope to be part of the conference next year.