JavaOne 2017

This year, I had the pleasure again to visit JavaOne. Not only did I attend the conference, I was also accepted to speak, which was quite a dream come true. The session catalog contains almost 500 sessions, and I obviously visited only a subset of them. I found two topics particularly interesting and decided to attend multiple sessions on each of them.

“Prepare for JDK 9” and “Migrating to Java 9 Modules”

Both sessions where more or less covering the same ground, although from a different perspective. Alan Bateman from Oracle took the more theoretical view and explained what you can expect to happen when you want to move to Java 9. He also busted some myths, like the one that “nothing will continue to work” or “everything first needs to be modularised”.

A few days later, Paul Bakker from Netflix took a more practical approach as he got his hands dirty with a small demo application based on Spring and Hibernate. He showed the different things that can go wrong or might break when upgrading to Java 9, and took care to explain how to deal with those issues.

“Serverless at Oracle” and “Serverless - The Future of the Cloud?!”

During one of the keynotes, Oracle announced and open sourced their Fn project. It promises to give a platform to run functions without having to worry about where they will run. The code samples and demos in the keynote were to short to have a good understanding, but during the “Serverless at Oracle” talk this was corrected. Impressive demo’s showed, among other things, so-called workflows (processes composed out of functions), compensating transactions to deal with failures and simple monitoring possibilities.

A few days later, Bert Ertman from Luminis started with a more theoretical explanation of what “serverless” actually means and what it tries to accomplish. In his words, serverless is finally bringing some of the things that the cloud has been offering for many years: cost savings because you do not only “pay as you go” but also “do not pay when you don’t go”. He then continued to demo writing a function and deploying it into the Amazon “Function as a Service” offering AWS Lambda, as well as reacting to various events that might happen elsewhere inside AWS. Before closing his talk, he also gave a few disadvantages or reasons why serverless deployments might not be a good fit.