Monday 10 September 2012

Open Crete: Day 1

A picture says a 1000 words!


Arriving on Saturday was definitely a great idea, as most of Sunday was spent sleeping or taking in these fantastic surroundings. The conference kicked off last night with a informal get to know each other at a local restaurant called Irene's Taverna.

Open Crete is run as an unconference, that is the participants very much direct the success and the output of the conference in the end. No sessions are planned up front, and the first part of this morning was grabbing some sticky notes and proposing sessions. I have proposed 3 sessions (which are pretty much inline with my talks coming up at JavaOne):

  • Why is the community important to Java? Adopt-a-JSR, OpenJDK and JUGs.
  • JavaFX Memory Visualisation.
  • An overview of the new DateTime API (JSR-310) in Java 8. 

We kicked off with two sessions this morning, which covered the future of Java. The general feeling was that modules is going to be a massive section missing from the next release of Java. It was acknowledged however that most of us have not seen the proposed profiles solution. After modules we discussed the impact of Lambdas. Although people are in general excited about Lambdas and what they can do, there is a concern that they will be perhaps used for the sake of using them and in some cases ignored because they are not understood. After discussing some consumer trends, we chatted about the future of Java given that there is currently no substantial mobile presence. The big feel is that laptops will soon become a "developer only" style tool - because regular consumers can get away with carrying an iPad. What does this mean for Java's future? Who is really behind driving Java forwards? 

The session definitely left food for thought as we break for afternoon of activities, and I am looking forward to considering the above in more detail as the week unfolds.

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