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SpringOne2GX 2015

This week, I had the privilege to talk at SpringOne2GX in Washington D.C. in not only one but 2 talks:

Apart from preparing and rehearsing, I also used the occasion to attend some talks. Here follows a resume of the best.

Spring Framework, the ultimate configuration battle

The talk compared 3 methods to configure a Spring application, good old XML, JavaConfiguration and Groovy. There were a number of use cases, and one speaker was to implement it in one of the dedicated way. The talk was very entertaining, as the 3 speakers seemed to really enjoy their show. I think JavaConfig was downplayed in some aspects, such as not using an anonymous inner class, to make Groovy shinier. However, I learned that XML and Groovy returned Bean Definitions and later instantiated while JavaConfig returned the beans directly.

Hands on Spring Security

Nice talk from Spring Security’s lead himself, with plenty of demos that highlight different security problems. For me, the magical moment was when the browser displayed an image that triggered a JS script. Thanks for Internet Explorer for content sniffing. I think security is often undervalued and that talk reminds you about it.

Intro to Spring Boot for the web tier

Spring Boot developers showed how to kick-start a web application from an empty app, to a complete fully-configured one. A step-by-step demo, like I like them, with each step the basis for the next one. Special mention to the error page, it’s worth a sight.

Apache Spark for Big Data Processing

The talk was separated into two parts, with a speaker for each: the first presented raw Apache Spark and it’s was quite possible to understand thanks to the many drawings and a demo; the second described Spring XD but unfortunately, slides with bullet points were not enough for that in regard to my existing knowledge.

Comparing Hot JavaScript Frameworks: AngularJS, Ember.js and React.js

This had nothing to do with Spring, but since I don’t do JavaScript, I decided to go in there to have an overview of the beasts. Plus the speaker was Matt Raible who kind of specialized himself in comparing frameworks, and he’s a good speaker. The talk was entertaining, but the usual conclusion was the same: do as you want, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Reactive Web Applications

Last but for sure not least, this talk really blew my mind. The good folks at Spring are aware of the Reactive wave and are surfing it full speed. In this session, the presenters demoed a web application which implemented the Reactive paradigm using different APIs (I remember RxJava and Netty but I’m afraid there were more): the server served content in a non-blocking way, depending on the speed of the subscribing client! I think when this is available for GA, this means web developers - myself included, will have to rethink the way they model client-server interactions. No more request-response but infinite streams…​

Conclusion

The 3 main ideas I come back with are: Spring Boot, Cloud Foundry and Reactive. Those are already either in place and evolving at light speed or soon to be implemented. Watch for them, they’re going to be the next big things (or already are).

However, as always, talks are only second to social interactions, meeting conference pals or being acquainted with new people and their ideas. It has been fun, folks, hope to see you next year!

Nicolas Fränkel

Nicolas Fränkel

Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Also double as a trainer and triples as a book author.

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SpringOne2GX 2015
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