This week I was fortunate enough to present at Javazone, the biggest conference in Norway, and as one local told me, apparently the second biggest java conference in all of Europe. The conference sold out to its maximum capacity of 1400 Norwegians one month before it even started, certainly demonstrating Java’s popularity and the talent pool this country has to offer. The IT industry in Norway appears exceptionally healthy with all of the stands aggressively recruiting people. Local Norwegians confirmed the current state constantly describing the wealth of opportunities available to them.

A lot of the developers I spoke to use the basic toolkit of Hibernate and Spring for most of their projects, and I found it a good sign most of them do automated testing of some form and some level of continuous integration. Many of them have adopted more specifically XP practices, but adoption of the agile values still seem to be missing. A Norwegian TW alumnus I spoke to confirmed this observation and is something he is struggling with in his current role.

I was surprised not to see many more sessions focused on Web 2.0 (as if there’s even a thing!) technologies, with only one session demonstrating the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Overall it was a well balanced conference with a number of sessions covering topics in core java (Swing, Java5, advanced memory tricks and tuning), enterprise java (EJB3, SOA, Webservices), web (JSF, GWT), testing (Watir, Selenium), methodology (Scrum, lean) and some fun stuff including mobile and embedded java.

Quite a number of notable java people came and spoke including the likes of Bruce Tate, James Strachan, Joshua Bloch, Rod Johnson, Gavin King, Floyd Marinescu and even a small handful of the agile community including Ken Schwaber, Mary and Tom Poppendieck and Johannes Brodwall.

If I got anything out of it personally, I now know that:

• JSF still seems too complicated and immature to be used just yet (with too many XML configurations and too many workarounds for practical use)
• The Java Persistence API (JPA), a part of the EJB3 spec, will not be as flexible as what JDO or Hibernate offers, and requires at a minimum at least two more XML files (orm.xml and persistence.xml). Admittedly it will offer great relief and better flexibility for standards-obsessed organisations and will be much more usable and effective than what Bean Managed Persistance ever could be.
• SPOT devices (hardware running the JVM directly without any OS) will change the sorts of applications we will be able to write allowing us easier integration with hardware than ever before.
• Sun’s announcement that they intend to fully support Ruby and Javascript officially on the JVM directly (with the intention of support more interpreted languages in the future), will certainly have a great impact on the industry.
• The Looking Glass 3D Desktop project looks interesting though might not be entirely practical.
• Joshua Bloch develops on a Mac.

I felt my presentation went successfully (on Test Driving Swing Applications) with an attendance of somewhere around 120 people. I had a great time talking and meeting people as well as sharing my experiences at such a large conference and would highly recommend anyone to present or even just there (thought it helps if you can speak Norwegian).