SpringOne2GX 2013 Recap
This year I had the pleasure of attending SpringOne2GX. Right on the heels of PlatformCF(which I also got to attend: Day 1 and Day 2), SpringOne had some exciting announcements and over a hundred sessions to choose from across nine tracks. In addition to the sessions, there were a few keynotes with some exciting announcements.
The keynotes were held at night, after drinks and dinner, which contributed to relaxed and open feeling presentations. Paul Maritz welcomed everyone and expressed his excitement for the threshold at which he sees computing. He recounted some important points in the history of computing, and asserted that we are at a point of change. He expressed his vision that IaaS is the new hardware, and PaaS is the new operating system, and that openness is critical for the developer in this new paradigm. Maritz passed the stage along to Adrian Coyler, who outlined and defined Spring IO, the new organizational model for the Spring ecosystem. In addition to the new organizational model and new components, Coyler announced Spring is moving towards platform releases, where all of the individual components will be tested together. David Syer followed Coyler, and where he demoed Spring Boot. Spring Boot is an opinionated tool that helps configure your project so you don’t have to. He showed how quick it makes development of a web app in a live coding session. He built a basic REST API in about 8 lines of Groovy (with the handy new @RestController annotation), and used Spring Boot to pull in the necessary beans and add an embedded tomcat. Moments later, the entire hall was accessing the app and watching the stats update live on the projection screen. Did I mention there was no XML: "I haven’t used [XML] for 6 months or so and I’m kind of not missing it." Juergen Hoeller took the stage next to introduce some of the changes coming in Spring 4, including great support for WebSockets. The keynote ended with a bang: Chris Beams unveiling the new Spring IO website live using blue-green deployments in Cloud Foundry(here's how he did it). The site will soon be open-sourced, and is intended to be a reference for using Spring Boot. The following night's keynote speakers covered the new release of Grails, Spring Batch, and Spring XD.
The diversity of sessions was refreshing and the quantity was overwhelming (impossible to attend 30 great sessions every day!). As a JavaScript developer, I wasn't sure how much I'd be able to get out of the conference, but I found multiple sessions in every time slot that competed for my attendance. I'm almost glad I don’t have a Java or Groovy background as the decision of which session to go to would border on paralyzing! Luckily, every session was recorded and will be made available at some point.