Amongst the many Java related conferences, this one flew under the radar. A real shame because it had many great sessions.
JavaZone might not be that famous internationally, but it still is the biggest Norwegian community-driven Java conference,
organized on a voluntary basis in Oslo since 2001, by javaBin, the Norwegian Java User Group.

Looking at the schedule, there's nothing to be embarrassed about compared to other Java conferences. It covers everything from Java 22 and GraalVM to Generative AI, Spring Boot, architecture, and best practices. All good, however many of the talks were presented in the Norwegian language, catering to the local audience of developers. However, a significant number of talks were delivered in English and from those ones we picked the most interesting to watch:

Pkl: Safe and Maintainable Config for Java Apps and Infrastructure
The new Pkl configuration language brings a safer and more maintainable approach to defining and managing configuration. It works with Kubernetes, Spring applications, and really anywhere that you have Yaml or other unstructured configuration. This talk will introduce Pkl and teach you how to use it in your Java applications and infrastructure.

Pain-free Functional Programming with Java 22
A session that introduces Java programmers to the notion of Functional Programming, borrowing paradigms and common battle-proven techniques from Scala.

Why You Should Use Quarkus For Your Next Project
A session about why coding with Quarkus not only makes our work more effective but fun as well.

Offline-first Architecture - How to survive without internet?
What is and why use a offline-first architecture, a design principle which assumes the lack of internet connectivity as the default state in software development. At Iprogrammer we've looked at local first applications in the past, explaining their use cases, like in "TinyBase And The Local First Movement", a in-memory reactive tabular data store". We pondered "What's the deal with that kind of Store?". The answer is that :

• It can be used when offline and sync with a remote service when going online
  
  
• It is effective in scenarios that continuous data connectivity is not guaranteed-don't assume that there's a Cloud always on the backend
  
  
• Local first - own your data and do not deposit them on a Cloud provider

The JavaZone session explores those concepts and presents an optimized architecture which supports Offline and synchronization scenarios.

Finally, "Contextual search with vector search: exploring your options with open source tools" must be in the A list. Vectors is the hottest topic right now and this session shows how to create such vector representations with different data solutions like ClickHouse, OpenSearch, PGVector and others. I singled out PGVector, an extension for PostgreSQL that renders it a viable alternative to specialized vector stores used in LLMs, which we've written about in "Turn PostgreSQL Into A Vector Store" .

The recordings are not available on YouTube but are instead hosted by Vimeo. You can access them through the event's main site or by going straight to Javazone's Vimeo page.

In conclusion, JavaZone is great and deserves to be among the top Java conferences. 

More Information

JavaZone Main

JavaZone Vimeo

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