Devoxx 09 - Great talks

The Devoxx conference is the place to be for everyone interested in Java and related techologies. And as one of the members of the steering team, I'm proud (again) on the impressive list of speakers we've gathered. My personal focus and interest is SOA and Cloud Computing. And that will definitely be covered at Devoxx!

University Day 1 - Monday Nov 16
The Cambrian Cloud Computing Explosion - John M Willis
Got to know John though his podcasts. John has a strong background in systems management and Tivoli, but his current focus is Cloud. And rest assured that he knows what a cloud is and knows all the players. For all the could enthusiastics: strongly recommended!
jBPM in Action - Tom Baeyens
Tom is "mister jBPM", the main driver behind jBPM, the JBoss BPM offering.
Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 - Chris Richardson
Chris is the founder of CloudFoundry. CloudFoundry provides tooling (and more) to deploy Java applications on Amazon EC2.
Note: CloudFoundry got acquired by SpringSource and SpringSource in turn got acquired by VMWare. Which is interesting as Amazon and VMWare are seen as big competing players in the cloud space.
SOA, OpenESB and OpenSSO Programming with Passion! - Sang Shin
Talk will be based on Sang's free online SOA course material.

University Day 2 - Tuesday Nov 16
Google App Engine for Java - a real live voyage to The Cloud
Develop along with the speakers your first (or next) application on the Google App Engine. No sales pitch, as the speakers are - Sam Brodkin and Scott Stevenson - are independent(s).
SOA In Practice - Nicolai Josuttis
Nicolas is the author of the book "SOA in practice". One of the better SOA books in my opinion.

Conference Day 1 - Wednesday Nov 17
ESB's and WebServices in Practice - Nicolai Josuttis
Once more Nicolas, but now with a more focused talk on the use of ESB's.
Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 - Chris Richardson
A condensed version of the University talk.
jBPM4 in Action - Tom Baeyens
A shortened version, ideal if you went to the cloud talk of John Willis on Monday.
Keeping Your Options Open, Even if the Cloud is Not - Doug Tidwell
Another specialist wrt. XSLT 2.0, but that's not the topic of this session. Doug will rather talk about the different Cloud offerings and standardization in the cloud space.
Distributed Programming the Google Way - Gregor Hohpe
Gregor is famous for his Integration Patterns. Focus of this talk are the base technologies underlying the Google imperium and the Google cloud solutions.

Conference Day 2 - Thrusday Nov 18
Using XML with Java: Spoilt for Choice? - Michael Kay
Michael Kay is the author of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor. Michael is "Mr XSLT". XML remains an important aspect of SOA and general (Java) development.
Note: actually we have 2nd XSLT guru at Devoxx, Doug Tidwell
Google Appengine Java: Groovy baby! - Patrick Chanezon and Guillaume Laforge
Another perspective on the Google AppEngine with focus on running different JVM based languages on Google AppEngine.
Master Data Management - Pierre Bonnet
Master Data Mangement is another important aspect of a SOA. Speaker is Pierre Bonnet, founder of the MDM Alliance Group.

Conference Day 3 - Friday Nov 19
BPM in a SOA Environment - Paul Brown
Paul Brown is the author of 2 great SOA books, is an architect at Tibco, but most importantly he is a senior, mild and fluent speaker on SOA. For this Devoxx talk, we have asked Paul to focus on BPM. Recommended!
Open Source SOA with Fuse - James Strachan
James is involved in a tremendous number of open source projects, usually focused on SOA and integraton, with ActiveMQ and ServiceMix being the most well known. Will be interesting to learn about the status of Fuse, the ESB based on ServiceMix.
Note: in particular as Progress acquired Iona and is behind FuseSource
Note 2: for those who remember the CXF WS framework, that's part of Fuse

See you at Devoxx!

Devoxx 2008

Last week I was at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp. Just 20 kms from where I live and the city where I grew up. Being one of the steering members, I gave a hand here and there and was involved in selecting the talks, in particular regarding SOA and security. I really enjoyed the conference, some of my highlights:

• Logo: simply love it
• Venue: the Metropolis movie theater is a really nice location and the the logo on these big screens looks soooo nice; the seats are just a bit too comfortable: my eyes seem to close automagically
• The team: I really had fun times this week with Frederik, Sven, Valérie, Jo, Stijn, Stephan, Gert, Dan, ...
• DataPower: the IBM partner talk had obviously some commercial aspect, but some insight on XML threats and the idea of an 'ESB in hardware' were simply awesome
• Paul Fremantle's talk on complex event processing and the conversation afterwards, e.g. on AMQP and the "unreliability of WS-ReliableMessaging" (Paul is the WS-RX spec lead)
• XSLT 2.0 by Doug Tidwell: XML remains relevant and Dough can bring his story in such a funny way (thanks Robin for arranging this)
  
• REST talk by Stefan Tilkov: although I have a more biased view on the REST and WS-* story, Stefan brings his message so well

And so much more: JAX-RS talk, OpenMQ, XML Persistence by John Davies and meeting Mr Ivar Jacobson at the Devoxx reception desk.

Already looking forward to Devoxx 2009! And thinking about new topics and speakers in the SOA/security area for 2009: Smooks, more cloud computing, new ESB features, BPM and BPEL (BPELScript?), design- and runtime governance of services, Master Data Management, new XML stuff, claims based security, trusted computing, ... Any suggestions?