The talks presented at the 4th JChampions Conference which took place between Jan 25 to Jan 30, are now available for free on YouTube. Topics ranged from Code and Tech to Career Advice.
JChampions is a bit special because it is comprised by the Java Champions. They are developers from around the world who are recognized for the contributions to the Java community. As such it goes without saying that the level of expertise accumulated at the conference was deemed very high.
And how could it be otherwise when some of the renowned personas of the Java community took part? Presenting there for instance were:
Simon Ritter, the Deputy CTO of Azul Systems
Cay Horstmann, Core Java and Java for the Impatient books author
Frank Delaporte, "Getting started with Java on the Raspberry Pi" author
Matt Raible, Anton Arhipov, Grace Jansen.. the list is too long to be comprehensive.
Each one is, of course, an expert in a Java topic and as such their presentations are a reflection of their expertise. Saying that there's been many great presentations, so we can only try to mention some of the most noteworthy:
Keeping Your Java Hot by Solving the JVM Warmup Problem The JVM is notorious for its hefty requirements in startup and warmup times. Each time the JVM starts an application, it must perform the same analysis to find hot spots of code and compile them;it takes much time to load, link, and initialize classes. This is referred to as the application warmup time. Of course, we are talking micro-seconds here, but the delay can make a difference when trying to spin VMs on the Cloud and run Microservices.
In this session, several approaches are outlined which can alleviated the problem.
Do you use the Optional class as it should be? Optional might be a step towards null safety for Java but the interface is a bit convoluted, therefore not many devs are confident that they're using it right. This session goes through the best practices in using it.
A tale of two cities: blocking code vs. non-blocking code This was a very good one, going through Java's timeline of async constructs. It starts with the classic Future/Callable and CompletableFuture, then goes reactive, and ends with Project Loom, added to Java 19.
Introducing Spring AI Of course generative AI couldn't be left out. With Spring AI you can start integrating the OpenAI and Azure OpenAI services with your Java code to unleash the power of AI in your apps and leverage the power of LLMs from within your Spring code.
The future of development: Are our jobs getting harder or easier? This session goes through some pressing questions which run each day inside a developer's mind. In this age of AI and automation, where our IDEs have gone a long way from the days of the venerable VI in integrating just about everything that shouts 'productivity', have we in fact gotten more productive, or is it just that the cognitive load trying to juggle all that has become overwhelming? Also, will AI write my code , hence replace me?
Migrating to Jakarta EE 10 There's still plenty of shops still on v8 and this session demonstrates how to upgrade an application from Jakarta EE 8 to Jakarta EE 10, to take advantage of the new and great features that v10 heralds.
and of course Bootiful Spring Boot 3 completes the list. Run by whom else, Josh Long, goes through everything you need to now about Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3.
IProgrammer's "Java 2023 Recap" goes through such subjects presented at the conference and more, like Software Supply Chain Security, the eternal battle between Jakarta and Spring, and Reactivity vs Virtual Threads and their effect on jdbc drivers.
As said there's many great sessions but if you were hard pressed to provide a summary, those would be the most eye catching.
To enjoy them all head over to JConf's Youtube channel and sort the videos by latest so that the conference videos come up on top lined up one after the other. Unfortunately they are not organized into a single playlist, but that's just a minor inconvenience. Enjoy!
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