Java Day Riga

I was invited to speak at the Java Day Riga Conference.

The conference took place at the Tallin Riga Hotel, which is a very nice hotel, just opened a couple of years ago. The hotel is also placed in the city centre, with walking distances to the nice areas.

I would like to thank Dmitry, for inviting me, and Oracle for sponsoring this event. According to Dmitry, the event would not be possible without the good faith from the Oracle. The event was free, so we had about 200+ attendees.

I like the badges, having a big and easy to read name.

Conference badget with easy to read names

The evening before the conference, we went out on a guide tour to see Riga. We hired a history professor, whom was very enthusiastic and knew a lot about what has happened to Riga over the many years. Riga is a very old city, named after the river, and it has been taken over many times between Germans, Polishes, Swedes, Russian etc.

Monument of freedom in Riga centre

The big monument in the city centre is the monument of independence, and on top it holds three stars, one for each of the three regions of Latvia.

Unfortunately after one hour it become too cold to pay attention, and we have already seen 4 churches, and many historical buildings. We found a place selling mulled wine, so we could get a bit of warm.

History Tour in Riga. Drinking mulled wine to get a bit warmth

After the tour we went for a later dinner, and just a few beers. The conference starts the next morning.

The keynote talks was good talks about the upcoming lambda expressions in Java 8. As well a talk about JEE 7, which has focus on the cloud.

Martijn Verburg preparing for his talk

Martijn Verburg, did a great talk titled "Diabolical Developer". It's a sort of pep-talk with common sense, where Martin says what some people may think is controversial. But what he really want to say, is that "think for yourself".

Martijn thinks developers are awesome

I gave a talk about Enterprise Integration Patterns and Apache Camel. In the talk I also demonstrated live coding, how to setup a new Camel project, and get that up and running in Eclipse etc. As well some of the powers of the Fuse IDE, which has graphical notation of your Camel routes, using the industry standard EIP icons. Likewise Fuse IDE is capable of doing runtime insights into running applications, which helps you pin point what is going on, as well being able to see performance statistics, with graphical representation etc.

In the end of the talk, the audience was giving a choice of either talking about Apache ServiceMix or the Camel roadmap. The audience chose the latter, so I gave a round about what to expect in the next Camel 2.9 release. Then we ran out of time. A talk for 50 minutes, is frankly a bit on the short side. 1h is usually the minimum.

In the airport on my way home. I spotted the Camel.

Camel spotting at the airport