Devoxx, the yearly appointment for Java geeks is upon us again. And off course I’m attending. As I have for the last 4 years or so. Being from Belgium and a Java programmer, it’s a practical no-brainer. For those not familiar with Devoxx, it used to be called Javapolis (but due to some dark political games, they changed names). It’s mainly split up w 2 parts: a two day University, featuring 3 hour in-depth talks and a three day Conference, with 1 hour talks which are more practice driven.

The first day of the university I chose two talks. The first one was called ‘The Productive Programmer’ and was about how to improve productivity as a developer (and a plug towards the book off course). A lot of obvious stuff in there, but always nice to hear the things I need to be productive are in there. It all revolves around ‘flow’. Being able to sustain a level of concentration in which you can do tremendous amounts of work. Like an interruption-free period of day. Like dual monitors on which you can display all the information you need. Like not having to use the mouse. Somehow I expected a plea towards Vim. Rates slightly under Uncle Bob’s talk last year about craftsmanship and ethics (and that says a lot).

In the afternoon I went to see the Spring Roo talk. I tried Roo in the past and wasn’t that impressed. This demo showed me some opportunities in which I see Roo flourish. Not in enterprise application development. It’s a wee bit to young for that and I don’t think that the mainstream development world is ready for the likes of Roo and it’s ITD’s (try and explain that to a 20-year Cobol-converted-to-Java developer, or worse, the army of offshore Indian developers). I do see a really big potential in prototyping. Being able to reverse engineer any database schema into a bunch of JPA entities and then build a complete (although somewhat basic) web GUI around it, seems really nice when you quickly want to show a client something that works. If you want to expose the database through a REST interface, this is done in a matter of minutes. As I said, the web UI is fairly simple (it does have complete CRUD capabilities with pluggable security, i18n, …) and won’t suffice for about 99.9% of your clients. But it’s a nice feature to be able to talk to a client, connect to its arcane database and whip up a RESTful web UI in minutes.

So far for day one…