Surrender your ego
Today Oleg presented a very interesting session about how class loaders work. He even remotely loaded classes from images (I imagine steganography).
Oleg works for Zero Turnaround, the company behind jRebel. Code examples here. The presentation is here.
One of the most interesting sessions so far IMHO.
A bit of introduction - we as a jug (java user group) got more active at the end of 2013 in no small part thanks to Ivan. We managed to build openjdk, import it in 3 major IDEs (eclipse, intellij and netbeans) and contributed a Virtual Machine with buildable openjdk 9 (both in fedora and ubuntu) and organized a couple of events, we decided we were ready for the next part.
At the end of 2014 we started timidly to try to contribute in the Adopt OpenJDK program. Adopt OpenJDK allows everyone* to participate in building and writing the java platform itself (or at least that's how we understood it *back then*).
We knew that LJC (London Java Community - their most popular jug) heavily participated in the new Date/Time API and soujava (Brasil's most popular jug) also managed to include code in the OpenJDK. Elated by these guys' successes we decided we had enough free time and sheer energy to contribute to the OpenJDK and thus put ourselves on the OpenJDK map.
In December 2014 we asked for something to work on. Nobody answered.
We decided to work on a simple Throwable convenience method (JDK-5050783). We had a hackaton. We submitted our fix. We were given some feedback and we submitted another. And we were told not to play with grown up stuff. That was a bit discouraging. But we didn't give up.
In February 2015 we started working on jaxp warnings. We fixed 43 easy warnings and submitted a patch. Then we fixed more harder warnings and submitted another patch. The great Joe Darcy answered but unfortunately we got nowhere again. That sucks.
A bit before that (Dec 2014) jug.bg member Doychin Bonzhev found a bug in the NetworkInterface and submitted a solution. He even submitted to another mail-list. He got a response (saying it is reasonable solution) and answered, but that was it. Nothing AFAIK followed.
So that was it for us. We gave up. Probably we didn't know the right people, but I argue that shouldn't matter. From time to time we get mentioned as collaborators in the Adopt OpenJDK by our dear friend Mani. We don't feel like that at all.
* Now you understand why the asterisk, right?
Today was the second edition of the jProfessionals format we started 5 months ago.
jProfessionals is a one-day free conf. Smaller than jPrime (our star yearly event).
In the first version we invited Koshuke Kawaguchi. (the creator of Jenkins CI).
Today the first presenter was Richard Warburton.
The session was about java 8 lambdas and even though it started as a very introductory session it turned out to be quite interesting. We discussed currying, Optional and the elvis operator.
What I learned is that Optional with value types is going to be fast (all in stack, no heap). Elvis is going in another direction - just a simple !=null check. Optional is kind of an explicit contract (preferred despite the verbosity and the extra object).
The second speaker was Vlado Tsanev aka tsachev.
He talked about Spring REST Docs. The talk was one big live demo. REST Docs is a way to document a rest api automatically by extracting the info from the tests - it creates cURL commands, headers, params as so called snippets, and it allows the use of a adoc files with links to the REST Docs snippets.
After a tasty lunch it was time for "The Seven Deadly Sins of Microservices" by Daniel Bryant.
It was a soft session with a lot of links and cool ideas of what microservices are good for and what they are not. There was a discussion on where people fail mostly using them. Very interesting and engaging - I bookmarked a lot of books that I'm never going to read.
Doychin Bondzev talked about Firebird (an alternative to postgres) - free, has triggers and is embeddable with nice tools and binary backup that is fast enough on windows.
Richard Warburton was next with another session for the future of Generics which was really fun.
I finally understood why enums are defined recursively (Enum<E extends Enum<E>>).
Next was a talk about Jenkins Builds with Docker Containers by Petar Velikov from e-card.bg.
It was quite interesting especially the docker part (he even used dockviz).
Finally there were two lightning talks. Martin Toshev talked about RxJava and RxJS.
Another guy - Teodor Tunev talked about Activiti - a java BPM platform far better than jBPM in his words.
Finally some beer was due.
(has not arrived yet)
My first fosdem this year. I found a lot of interesting things mostly on the opensource tracks. The "free java" track IMHO was a bit unpopular even though Stephen Chin and Mark Reinhold were there.
I guess I'm used to a better treatment on a conference (I go mostly as a speaker). Here it was rainy and cold and even though the french fries were awesome, I'm used to better food.
Antoan presented a session about Spring Boot running on Docker and how to use the docker maven plugin inside a Spring Boot application.
Actually we talked mostly about running Docker and application from the ecosystem. There was a statement that uninstalling Kitematic requires payment, which started a discussion about this model.
