Forging a Bond Between Florence and Eclipse

A couple of weeks ago I went to Florence to participate to the Eclipse Day. I was really looking forward to this as I'm fond of everything Italian and I had only good memories of my previous stays in Florence. It was a lot of fun revisiting the cathedral and meeting David again in all his glory. 

But of course also the Eclipse Day itself was definitely worth the visit. It was extremely well organized with really good food and with very interesting content. I was also very excited to hear afterwards that all the sessions had been recorded. So the good news is that even if you were not able to attend, you still have a chance to look at the different talks as they have been made available on YouTube lately. If you want to see myself in action talking about the Eclipse integration of the Forge command-line, you are invited to watch the video included below.

Cheers,
Koen

Hello From Forge2

I have created a short video that demoes how to create a very simple add-on (the Forge 2 version of a plug-in). Everything to do this yourself is included in the upcoming JBoss Tools 4.1.0.Beta1 release.

Cheers,
Koen

Hello Forge2 from Koen Aers on Vimeo.

From Zero to Java EE in About 20 Minutes

Two weeks ago I went to London to present my quickie 'From Zero to Java EE in 15 Minutes (or Less)' at the Devoxx UK 2013 conference. Congratulations to the team for a fantastic job organizing the first UK version of this amazing conference.

The presentation was mostly a live coding demo using JBoss Forge and JBoss Developer Studio. The catch is that I gave myself the daunting task of creating a Java EE application by reverse engineering entities from an existing database, scaffolding a JSF user interface from these entities and subsequently deploying this application in the cloud.

I had done the presentation in some form a couple of times earlier, among others at DevConf 2013 in Brno and at Devoxx 2012 in Antwerp. But London made a difference: the quickie at Devoxx UK was actually the first one where nothing went wrong and where I was able to finish within the scheduled 15 minutes so I was very happy.

I was actually so happy that I decided to publish a recording of the demo for a wider audience. The recorded version takes about 20 minutes so I again missed my target of 15 minutes but I guess the interested viewer will be able to cope with the 5 extra minutes... ;-)

You can watch the video below.


From Zero to Cloud in Almost No Time from Koen Aers on Vimeo.

Cheers,
Koen

Open Source, Czech Republic Style

During the last weekend of Februari I was fortunate enough to attend the Devconf conference in Brno in the Czech Republic.  I set out not knowing what kind of event to expect but it turned out to be a fine conference with an attendance of about 500 people covering a plethora of open source subjects. The event took place on the campus of the department of informatics of the Brno university so it felt a bit like the little sibling of the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

Dinner in a church?

I arrived on Friday afternoon and later in the evening I hooked up with some of the colleagues for dinner. Particular about that meal was that the place where we took it was situated in a former church! I was given the address of the place but nevertheless walked past it twice… Who would think of a restaurant in a building that is a church? ;-)

The restaurant in the church. 

In case you wonder, the picture is from a long time ago

so Czech people have modern cars right now ;-)

Busy Saturday

On Saturday I had to deliver a Forge talk on how to raise your productivity writing Java EE applications and a lightning talk on how to create a web application in the cloud by reverse engineering a database. Both talks were received well and had a fair number of attendees. 

Mike Bonnet (l.) and myself (r.) tasting Czech beer

In the evening the organizers had organized a party in a club close to the conference venue. There was an abundance of food and drinks but I had to keep my manners as I needed to host a Forge plug-in writing lab on Sunday morning.

More pictures of the first conference day and of the party.

Hacking, hacking, hacking...

Thanks to Pavol Slegr who had made sure that all the needed software was installed on the machines in the lab room this lab was also a big success. All the attendees were able to successfully create a Forge plug-in for Hibernate Envers. I know that some of them were going to use this knowledge immediately to create a plug-in for the technology they were working with. I'm already impatient to see the results of their work appear in the Forge plug-in repository. 

Jozef Chocholacek (l.) and Pavol Srna (r.) paying a lot of attention in the Forge plug-in lab

The rest of the Sunday was spent having lunch with the Fuse crew, participating to the Arquillian hackfest. 

More pictures of the second conference day.

On Monday morning I went to our Brno office for a couple of hours to continue these talks with the Arquillian team but by the early afternoon I was already back on my way out to catch the flight back home. It has been a very tiring but fun and interesting weekend. Congratulations again to the organizers of the event!

Cheers,

Koen

P.S. The recording of the Forge session has been made available on Youtube.