So, one more Java event happened this last weekend down here in Brazil. The Developers Conference, organized by Globalcode, took place on the 6th and 7th of November in São Paulo, and it is going also to Florianópolis (9th) and Rio de Janeiro (11th).

Like last year, the event featured international speakers, and was really nice. In this and two other posts, I’ll be talking about what happened in São Paulo, since this is the location I attended.

Lets start off saying that this edition was the best one until now. Among the international speakers, we had Rod Johnson (Springsource), Ed Burns (Sun) and Mike Keith (Oracle).

Opening

The event started with Vinicius Senger’s (Globalcode) dancing robots. They started some music and turned the robots on, which started to dance. The dance was programmed by themselves into the toys. Really funny =)

dancing robots

Fast forward to a break that happened later, here is a closer picture of the robots in the stage above:

robots!

For the music, they used a parody they made themselves. They created a new music, based on an existing one, with lyrics related to software development. As soon as I have the link, I’ll post it here. That was really really funny.=D

One thing that always grab my attention at those events are how much some people are excited about their stuff. You could see this clearly about Vinicius in the entire event; but special was his scream at the end of the opening: “I love what I do!”

Rod Johnson

Rod Johnson was the first international speaker. He talked about how things are evolving in the software development world, and mentioned things like the fact that different kinds of data storage might be interesting, instead of using relational databases for everything; cloud computing and how Springsource (and VMware) might be involved (CloudFoundry). It also seemed that he likes Groovy and Grails a lot.

rod johnson at tdc day 1

The talk was a little bit philosophic but interesting nonetheless.

Career Panel

Next we had a career panel, featuring the three international speakers. They basically told us some stories about how they started their careers, and things like what would they expect in interviews and the like.

career panel

Lightning Talks

Spread during the day, we also had lightning talks, with subjects like GWT, Google Guice, Agile Developement and Software Architecture, EJB 3.1 (samples, available on Kenai) and ScrumToys (which is available as a NetBeans sample project and a Glassfish sample application). Two pictures of those:

agile and architecture

ejb 3.1 samples

And in-between presentations, Vinicius appeared again with one more toy. Now, a robotic balloon:

robotic balloon

Mike Keith

Following we had Mike Keith talking about J2EE 6. He talked a little bit about the timeline of the past releases, and about a few new features coming. Note-worthy, although not that new, is the definition of JEE Profiles – different versions of the application server, with different sets of libraries, for different scenarios.

For some odd reason, I don’t have a picture of this… so lets move on.

Ed Burns

Finally, Ed Burns talked about JSF 2.0 components. Some quick highlights: development of components should now be really easy; components can be built in groovy and can be packaged together with CSS and JS files; support for EL inside CSS files and CSS can be put anywhere in the page – JSF takes care of moving them to the page head tag later.

JSF 2.0 Components with Ed Burns

And that was all for day 1 of the event! The next post will be about the second day, which was as busy as the first one. Stay tuned!

EDIT: Click here for the coverage of the second day of the event.

EDIT 2: Here is the link for the video.