Thoughts from the Devoxx 2010 Conference

I am sitting at the Brussels airport killing 1 hour before my flight back home. So I spend the time with Stella Artois and my laptop (without internet) which is a perfect opportunity for me to write a blog with some of my thoughts from the conference.

At the speakers dinner I had the pleasure of getting a ride with Stefan Janssen who is the organizer of the conference. On the ride was also Martin Dashorst and Guillaume La Forge.
Martin, Guillaume and I was also seater at the dinner and I enjoyed talking to them. It was great to hear from Guillaume that Groovy and Grails is moving forward very nicely. I have to say that when I first encountered the Groovy language about 4 years ago, I really liked it a lot. Likewise the Groovy in Action book is one of the best Manning book I have read.

Naturally we also talked about James Strachan, who was one of the founders of Groovy and is employed by FuseSource, and his recent statement about his new passion for Scala, and his works on Scalate.

It was nice talking to Martin Dashorst from the Wicket team. He is doing well as a consultant in Holland. In fact he is the boss for Phillip Luppens, whom I worked together with back on the WebWork days (the project which later was renamed to Struts2).

On wednesday I had the please to meet Phillip and Rainer Herams, whom are also from the WebWork team. They was so kind to invite me to the traditionally open source dinner that evening. At the dinner I meat other great people. For example Konstantin Pribluda who had developed a OCR recognition software on his android. It was completely client only which was impressive. For example you could use it to scan business cards and have it trained to detect the company name, personal name, email and so on.

I think its needless to say that we moved on to a cool bar which was in the basement, medieval style. We got a couple of rounds of beers, and mind this is the Belgian style beers, which tend to be stronger than the regular beers.

On thursday evening I was supposed to enjoy a quiet and relaxed dinner with the guys again, but unfortunately during the afternoon I started to fell that I could catch a cold. So I returned back to the hotel to catch some rest. In the evening I strolled in the Antwerpen centrum looking for some nice Belgian waffles. Back at the hotel I added some more slides to my presentation based on feedback I got from the people who visited us at the FuseSource boot at the exhibition hall at the conference. I rehearsed the presentation to make sure I got time left for QA at the end.

On friday morning I ran another rehearsal and went on my way to the conference. At the conference I meet up with my colleagues, Paul and Charles, from FuseSource who was so kind to drive here to hear my presentation.

Claus Ibsen speaking at Devoxx 2010

At 10:35 I got myself to the room 9 where the Apache Camel talk is taking place. I meet up with Martin Dashorst and he was so kind to help setup my mac laptop so it was ready for the presentation. Thanks a lot Martin. Loved that you got it working so I was able to see the next slide ahead on the laptop during the talk. I kinda like being able to start introducing the next slide before its displayed for the audience.

People keep coming in the room and it was almost full at 10:45 when we got started. I started well and the presentation was going well. Of course there was once a situation where my nerves was playing a trick on me. But that is expected during the first couple of minutes. Its after all the Devoxx conference where you are doing the presentation in a cinema with 400 people in the room.

The talk went really well, despite the fact there was a situation with the sound for some minutes. I finished the slides 8 minutes before the time was up. So we had a fairly bit of time for QA. And there was good questions from the audience.

I do hope the talk was inspiring and that people didn't fell it was one hour wasted. Well when I get back maybe some of the tweets will give me a clue if people liked the presentation.

I will post the slides at slideshare. You can get the presentation here.

The video recording of the talk will later be available from Parleys. Of course I will keep an eye when it will be there. However I don't know if my talk will be freely available, or its part of the Parleys subscription.

Well I am out of beer and this blog is over.

In the weekend I gotta work on my last revisions for the Camel book so we can do the 2nd edition of the type setting. The book will be in print in mid December. Just in time for christmas.

Devoxx here I come

This time I will attend the great conference Devoxx which is held in Antwerpen, Belgium. We at FuseSource sponsor the vent and we have a booth as well. So if you are attending the conference then please stop by and say hello.

I will be there for the full 3 day conference, as I am scheduled to speak on friday about ... yes Apache Camel.

As we are in Belgium there should be plenty of opportunities to have a talk over a beer. After all Belgium is known to have a great variety of beers. And as any other half wicket engineer I am listed on the javaholic page, so yes I love my coffee beans and beers.

Hope to see you there.

Route debugging in Camel 2.6 and other Camel news

I have previously blogged about some experiment we did on making route debugging easier in Camel.

We now the experiment is over and its included out of the box in Camel 2.6. I have updated the documentation as well. The documentation shows you that all you have to do is override a method in your test class. Set the breakpoint inside this method and you can now debug Camel routes easily.

There is a big mighty screenshot showing this in action at the documentation which is worth a thousand words.

Oh and the Camel community continues to kick ass. We got a new committer on board, Johan Edstrom. And Mark Ford contributed a JMX component. While Richard Kettelerij contributed a Spring Web Services component.