I had the chance to attend Jfokus 2020 with my colleagues Matti Tahvonen and Sami Ekblad. Jfokus is Sweden's largest software developer conference and an "all-about-Java" event. There were over 2000 visitors and dozens of international speakers and exhibitors.
The event
Most of the talks had a JVM-focus, with just a few touching on front-end topics. The visitors at the Vaadin booth were mostly interested in understanding how Vaadin works, and how it makes it possible to implement web user interfaces in Java, without coding JavaScript and HTML at all.
It was also interesting to listen to developers who currently use, or have used, Vaadin in their projects, and how the framework enables them to achieve high productivity, especially when Java is a strength in their teams. They agreed that being able to use the libraries and frameworks available in the rich and mature Java ecosystem when implementing the frontend of an application is a key advantage, when compared to commonly-used JavaScript frameworks.
The code
There's no doubt that developer conferences attract visitors, not only because of the high-quality technical talks, but also because they are a great opportunity to visit the booths and collect as many stickers and t-shirts as possible, join raffles, and most importantly, interact with the teams behind top-notch technologies in the software development industry.
So, I explored the booth area to get a first-hand overview of the frameworks and technologies around Java. For example, I learned a couple of new tricks from the guys at IntelliJ IDEA, saw cool snippets of code on distributed computing at the Hazelcast booth, and got a quick intro to graph databases with Neo4J, just to name a few of the interesting techs I saw.
We also shared ideas and even coded with the guys at Bryntum. I see good potential to implement Java wrappers with Vaadin for their UI components. If you are interested in collaborating with me in an open-source effort, let me know and let's hack some Java code together! And talking about hacking, the guys from Gradle helped iron out some rough edges of our upcoming Vaadin branded Gradle plugin.
The aftermath
We traveled from Turku, Finland (where Vaadin's headquarters are) to Stockholm by ferry, with a car. Quite handy, I have to say. While traveling, we discussed what we had learned at the event and felt humbled to realize how cool an open-source web framework we are developing for the Java ecosystem at Vaadin.
After almost 25 years, Java continues to wow me. And Jfokus 2020 was exemplary on this. I'm definitely looking forward to joining the next edition of the event. Hope to meet you there next time!