NLJUG – Nederlandse Java User Group NLJUG – de Nederlandse Java User Group – is opgericht in 2003. De NLJUG verenigt software ontwikkelaars, architecten, ICT managers, studenten, new media developers en haar businesspartners met algemene interesse in alle aspecten van Java Technology.
So Jeroen and I went to Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne 2013 – the event to be at if you’re a professional Java software developer. Or do other Oracle stuff. We want to give some first impression of the trip, San Francisco and JavaOne in this blog post and keep you updated the coming days during the event.
After checking in and boarding the plane we went off to the USA. After watching the first movie (which had some hiccups in the beginning) out interactive movie player broke down and we ended up picking our noses for 8 hours straight 
. But after 10 and a half hours we landed in the San Francisco. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.
We got our luggage and asked for some information on where we should get off the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transfer) for our hotel. The woman gave us some directions on how to get to Lombard street and off we went. The nice lady told us it was a nice little walk of 20 minutes to get to Lombard and since we were folded up in an airplane chair for 10 and a half hours we thought we could use the exercise. But when we finally got there at the block 7 we noticed our hotel is on the other side of town all the way at block 23…
After a good walk of an hour we finally arrived at the hotel. We checked in, dropped our suitcases and went off to the front desk to get directions to the Moscone center. Our best bet was to take the number 30 bus which stopped close to it. We walked to the bus stop, entered the bus, paid $2 for a ticket and waited for 45 minutes to finally arrive at Moscone. We signed up for JavaOne, got our badges and we informed about shuttles that drive from various hotels to the JavaOne conference. Just our luck… non of the 6 shuttles drive by our hotel or stop anywhere near our hotel. After that we headed to Pier 39 and had some diner.
Sunday morning Jeroen woke up and headed for the shower. After toying around with the various instrumentations on the wall he had no idea how to turn on the shower and asked me if he had any clue on how it should work but no luck… after telephoning the front desk they sent someone up to explain to us how it works – yes, Jeroen was feeling a but noobish about it. So you might think… how much time and how many hotel employees does it take to turn on a shower? Well, the correct answer to that was 50 minutes and 3 employees! We didn’t feel like total losers after all .
We hadn’t much planned for Community Day but we were up early to pick up our materials as of 7.00 hours at the Moscone center, a nice sturdy Oracle backpack. Not only it replaced a personal bag and a separate laptop, but it came also with a Java T-shirt and a handy re-closable drinking cup.
At 9.15 we were on time to take one of the earlier sessions we just walked by: GarbageCollection: TheUsefulParts, PartI. John from JClarity showed various examples of how to tune garbage collection (GC) in the JVM and how you can see its performance with a profiler. He listed possible GC algorithms, such as Concurrent Mark & Sweep, some of which were not very known to us. You can find quite some good JVM tuning documentation out there but some pictures about how young generation (Eden, Survivor 1 and 2), tenured generation and PermGen work together, are worth more than a thousand words.
After the keynote it was clear that Oracle is still hot on track to make the future Java. The idea that the Internet of Things (IoT) is not something that you read in science fiction books but should be available to everyone. By partnering up with various embedded hardware manufacturers (Qualcomm, etc) they want to make Java the number one platform to use over the various embedded devices. And not only this… finally we get a single API that can run along all those platforms and the platforms we already know: Java SE and ME are going to share the same API.
Coming days have much to promise! Jeroen will be going to all kinds core Java and JEE sessions, while I’m hoping to learn some new Groovy, Spring and Maven material. I’ve also planned to see some of my favorite JEE author, Adam Bien.
