Dieses Jahr hatte unsere Mobile Developer Reisegruppe das Glück die MDC 2012 quasi vor der Haustüre, nämlich in Stuttgart, vorzufinden. Das machte den Besuch natürlich noch viel reizvoller. Darüber hinaus kündigte sich mit Robert Virkus,  dem  Gründer eines unserer Partnerunternehmens, Enough Software aus Bremen, ein spannender Talk über das , meiner Meinung nach derzeit heißeste Thema im Mobile Bereich, an. Doch dazu später mehr.

Weitere spannende Talks versprachen Markus Jungingers GreenDAO Talk und natürlich auch Lars Vogel seine angekündigte Übersicht über die Neuerungen von Android 4(.2)

Da unsere Gruppe aus iOS als auch Android Developern bestand war schnell klar, dass man sich unterschiedliche Talks anschauen möchte.

Die 7. "Free an Opensource Software Conference" fand zwar schon letztes Wochenende in St. Augustin (nahe Bonn) statt, aber darüber zu bloggen lohnt sich dennoch. Denn die FrOSCon ist mit 5€ Eintritt (bzw. 100€ Business-Support) nicht nur eine der günstigsten Konferenzen, sondern wie ich finde auch eine der lohnenswertesten.

Die Gründe hierfür sind zahlreich, es wird sehr sparsam mit den Worten "business", "cloud", "oracle" und insbesondere "enterprise" umgegangen. Letzteres eigentlich nur im Bezug auf den Internet Explorer 6 gehört . Es gab jede Menge themenbezogene Räume und die Tracks "Administration" "Entwicklung" und allgemeine Nerd-Technik waren recht ausgeglichen und allesamt interessant.  Ein weiteres Alleinstellungsmerkmal der Konferenz ist die Hüpfburg, im Hof der Fachhochschule, die unter Berücksichtigung der Regel "kleine Nerds vor großen" nicht nur für Kinder ein Spass ist.

Heute will ich einmal die Gelegenheit nutzen und die beiden wohl populärsten Konferenzen für Java-Entwicklung innerhalb Europas gegenüberstellen. Dazu muss ich aber fairerweise anmerken, dass ich die Devoxx'2011 komplett besuchte, während ich auf der JAX'2012 leider nur 2 Tage sein konnte.

Organisation:

Dienstag

15:32 Rebecca gibt mir die Unterlagen, Tickets und Infos zur BedCon. Perfekt organisiert - sie hat sich bereits um alles gekümmert.

Mittwoch - Anreise

16:32 Flo, Aljona und ich brechen mit Sack und Pack und einer Ikea-Tasche mit Bier in Richtung Hbf auf. Unterwegs stößt Markus dazu.

17:00 Wir sind im Zug und es geht los. Wir öffnen ein Bier - eine Stunde vor der offiziellen synyx Bier-Time.

Belgium, November 2011. More than three and a half thousand people are surging into Antwerp's megaplex, the Kinepolis. It's Devoxx-time!

Devoxx 2011 from Roy van Rijn on Vimeo.

From November 14th to November 18th Europe's biggest community-organized (i. e. not organized by a big corporation) Java conference took place in its traditional venue in Antwerp and of course Synyx was there, too. Marc already wrote about why we like attending Devoxx in Reasons why I go to Devoxx.

This year was the first time I attended Devoxx. Although I've been going to other conferences before, Devoxx positively sticks out for a couple of reasons.

Yet another year is almost over. One of the reasons I notice this is because Devoxx is coming up again. And - of course - Synyx is going to be there. In the last year four of Synyx' employees attended the full conference. This year all of last years visitors are going again, and even three more. So there has to be a reason why it's so popular. This post is going to be about Devoxx and why I personally enjoy going there. Well... there are several reasons...

From May 9 2011 to May 10 the third OpenCms Days took place in Cologne. The topic of the conference was "The OpenCms 8 User Experience", targeting the release of OpenCms 8 with its advanced direct edit (ADE) functionality. We at Synyx, being a sponsor for the third conference in a row, have been looking forward to both of these events, the conference and the release of OpenCms 8 for quite some time. In this blogpost I want to mention some of the highlights of the conference, in another blogpost I will describe some of the new features of OpenCms 8.

It has been a while since these pages saw some content. The daily software engineering business calls for our full attention, leaving us writing more code than content. Which is absolutely a good thing! Nevertheless we want to show you, that we are still pretty much alive.

While still working on some new articles, we are at this very moment in Berlin to visit the Droidcon conference. From March 23rd to 24th, we will be attending the barcamp sessions & talks. It will be our pleasure to meet familiar faces as also new people there and we are looking forward to interesting discussions.

I just returned from Solr Summit in Frankfurt, a half day mini conference about Solr, the search server based on Apache Lucene. It has been a really worthwile event with a lot of insight into large scale implementations of Solr.

The first half of the conference Marc Krellenstein, a Co-Founder of Lucid Imagination, presented trends in enterprise search as well as Lucids commercial Solr environment Lucid Works Enterprise. After an outline of the history of search systems he presented different characteristics of a successful search system. Though being held by someone who is obviously biased towards Solr and Lucene he also summarized where commercial search systems like Autonomy and Fast have their strengths, good to have an insight into competing systems.

So this is the second part of my experiences with Devoxx 2010. I'll still stick to not writing about the talks in detail but telling my thoughts as a "first time visitor".

So day three to five at Devoxx were "Conference" days which have - in opposite to the University-Talks Florian and I mentioned earlier - much shorter talks. This had the trade-off I mentioned before: You have many switches of topics between the talks which actually made it sometimes kind of hard to even remember at the evening what I saw in the morning. But what I have to admit is, that even if there were more talks a day the quality of them was excellent. There were so many brilliant Speakers (Josh Bloch, Neil Ford and Matt Reible just to mention very few of them) and almost all talks were as well interesting and entertaining.