JavaOne LAD (Brazil) 2012 Days 2 and 3

Hi, I want to share my experiences in the last couple days at JavaOne LAD (Brazil). Day one has been already reviewed here.

Day Two

There was a conference about Oracle Developer Cloud Services which I liked a lot. Great move from Oracle who is moving all its apps and  infrastructure services to the cloud. With such product, you have software lifecycle tools ready to be used. Tools such as: source control management (GIT), issue tracking, Hudson CI and Wiki collaboration. The services is in Preview mode, so you have to contact Oracle in order to test it.

Next I attended a session called "Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert? Java and the Raspberry Pi" (clever...) which introduced us to the "Raspberry Pi" a credit-card sized computer, imagine that! And you can embed java in it!! There were two live example of embedding Java in a Raspberry Pi. The first one, was a kiosk with all JavaOne LAD session information. Really nice kiosk with touch support and JavaFx.
The second one was a robot created by Vinicius Senger which uses Raspberry Pi and Glassfish Server so you can control the robot using REST WS, awesome!!

The final session of the day was given by Arun Gupta. "Java EE 7 Platform: More Productivity and Integrated HTML". Really nice session packed with the latest news about the JavaEE platform which is schedule to be released on the first quarter of 2013.

At night, Oracle invited the JUG leaders to a nice dinner. Pizza and beers for all of us and networking all around. Was great to meet several Brazil JUG Leaders and learn from their experiences and their culture.

Day Three

Last day of JavaOne LAD. Thanks to Otavio Santana who showed me the correct route to reach the expo center by Metrô as detailed in my previous post. Unfortunately, some sessions were rescheduled and I didn´t noticed that, so I missed the session "JavaFX: Implementing Multitouch with TUIO for Interactive Devices" who was given by Steven Lizarazo, the only Colombian speaker at JavaOne LAD. Congrats!

Next, Stephen Chin talked about JavaFx and HTML5, showing one demo about a JavaFx application which contains map (google map) interaction. It was nice to see how you can integrate both technologies. I skipped the next two conferences because I was presenting a quick demo about Fork/Join Framework at the OTN lounge.

The last conference I attended, was about SQA: "Testing JavaServer Faces Applications with Arquillian and Selenium" given by José Rodolfo Freitas. He showed several ways to test our applications using those frameworks. It was a crowded session, but there was no translation available... so I'm glad the slides were in english... Anyway, thanks José for checking if I was understanding portuguese. 

At the end of the day, the Community Keynote and the first ever Duke's Choice Awards where I was part of the judging panel.

The hosts of the event were Yara Senger and Bruno Sousa (the Brazil JavaMan), great JUG leaders in Brazil. They joked and talked about how we can get involved and participate in the future java by joining/creating a JUG or Adopting a JSR. They also presented some startups that leverage the power of Java for their business ideas.

The entertainment was provided by several JUG leaders who played in a band. They performed some Beatles and Java songs and it was really, really funnny. The Duke's choice Awards winners were presented. We had like 24 nominees, but only 3 could be selected as winners. It was a tough decision since there were a lot of innovation in all projects. I liked that we had several Java technologies competing, from Desktop to Web apps. And the winners were: Tqtvd tots, Cpqd and Tivit. I do have to write another post about the projects I liked the most but were not selected as winners, so you can meet them, specially two Colombian Projects: Kuwaiba and ZathuraCode.

As a regional JavaOne, it is different from the JavaOne SFO, it's smaller. Both events  Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne are run in the same place, so some times you may find executives wearing suites and ties or developers wearing T-shirts and jeans... I heard from some other attendees that this year was a better JavaOne LAD.

What I liked:

Strong community (Brazil).

Oracle sent several speakers from JavaOne SFO.

Dinner invitation from Oracle ;)

Party invitation from Google :)

Hospitality from the JUG leaders I met.

What I didn't like:

Lack of participation from other south american countries. I mean, is JavaOne LAD (Latinamerican) but most of the attendees and speakers were from Brazil.

The food could be better or cheaper (or included in the full conference pass :p)

Poor twitter or website updates when sessions were rescheduled.
There were no Oracle stores.

Anyway, I hope I can make it for JavaOne LAD 2013 so I can go with other Colombian friends and why not, maybe we can have a first ever Duke's Soccer Cup at Brazil... nice!

see ya!