JavaOne 2014 - Monday

Hello there, this was day two of JavaOne 2014, it was a full day of conferences, tried to attend as many as I could and with a wide range of topics:

How to build enterprise mobile apps that integrate with your Java EE backend

The talk was about Hybrid Apps and how to connect them to your Java EE app. A hybrid app is written with web technologies but runs as native app. 

The speaker explained how Apache Cordova wraps the html app, lets developers create JS libraries to access native features such as the camera and packs the app as an Android or iOS native app.

Regarding to the IDE, he showed how you can use Eclipse with JBoss Tools plugins and Eclipse thym plugin in order to create a hybrid mobile app. From Eclipse you can write your html files and test them on the Cordova browser which is integrated to Eclipse or you can use an emulator called Genymotion which is an Android emulator. One good thing about the emulator is that you can connect your Chrome developer tools to it.

Another nice feature is called LiveReload Server which lets you change your code and watch the changes immediately on the test browser (does not work with the emulator)

The speaker talked about how responsive frameworks such as bootstrap or heavy frameworks such as jquery mobile are not good enough for today's mobile apps. He introduced us to the ionic framework and talked about some of its pros: mobile only, big community and is integrated with Angular JS

Then we saw how JBoss Forge can help us in order to create our java classes and rest end points very fast and easy. The rest end points can be tested from Google Chrome using the Postman plugin. He also used Forge  to create the ionic application with a few commands on the console.

Regarding to Push notifications, we saw how the Unified PushServer, which is an Eclipse plugin it's a server to be deployed and it comes with Clients SDKs (ios, Android and Cordova), can help us on implement Push notifications for several platforms such as iOS, Android, Amazon, Firefox, etc. Without having to code them ourselves.

Here are the tools used during the presentation in order to develop the hybrid application:

Apache Cordova

Genymotion -Android emulator

ionic - Mobile only HTML 5 framework

Angular JS - HTML 5 web framework

JBoss Forge - Rapid Application Development tool for Maven and Java EE

Postman - Plugin for Google Chrome to test your rest en points

AeroGear Push - Push Notifications


Hackergarten

There was a space at the JavaOne exhibition hall where attendees could contribute to open source projects, meet members of the JCP and hangout with other developers. There were different topics each day. On Monday, for example, during the time I was there I met Anatole Tresch the spec lead of JSR 354 - Currency and Money. A very nice person, who kindly explained me some parts of the API and how we can participate through the Adopt a JSR program.

Thinking in Functional Style
This is one session I could not attend last year, so this time I arrived early in order to make it inside the room. Venkat Subramaniam is by far one of the best speakers I have ever seen. He introduced us to functional programming with simple examples and engaged the audience with such simple stories, jokes and easy vocabulary. When he starts talking, he doesn't stop until the session is over. Highly recommend to attend to his sessions. Here are some topics about functional programming that he talked about:

• Assignment-less programming
• Immutable state -> Less error prone
• Functions with no side-effect
• Declarative - The what, transform data, pure, pass functions as parameters, functional composition
• Function composition - You can chain functions
• Lazy evaluations - Is good since not all evaluations are applied
• Immutability and pure functions make functional programming

You can download the topics list and code examples from:
Thinking in functional style

JCP anniversary
At night, we were invited to the 15th anniversary of the JCP. Special thanks to Heather Vancura for such a great party at the 46th floor of the Hilton Union Square hotel. Nice view of San Francisco, food and beverage, entertainment was provided by the NullPointers, a band of Java Geeks who showed their passion for music.

Was a great day, looking forward for more fun at JavaOne.

See ya!