The Java Sessions: The Best of OSCON 2011


Summary: Only for hobbyists

I was very excited when I finally got this video. I work with Java for quite some time now and I was thrilled with all these new ideas around Java and JVM. You will find here topics related to recent research devoted to JVM, both theoretical and practical. Topics cover wide range of topics related to application development as well. This is at the same the strength and the weakness of this video. You will find here gentle (short) introduction to functional thinking, you will see an example of how to improve your services step by step right from the Twitter guys, you will learn how to elevate Gradle usage, and argue regarding the purpose of software configuration. I am pretty sure that after watching “Coding over Configuration” you will have more questions than answers – just like I did.

How about my experience? Well, I think I benefited by half of the material. I am not quite for jQuery which means I dropped this part entirely, the same refers to Visage Android Hands-on Lab. I am simply not into it. I tried to watch, but it turned out I was not interested at all. What I really enjoyed was “Functional Thinking”. Neal was able to present in very comprehensive way material, usually considered hard to follow. “Implement Your Own JVM Compiler” was interesting, but I will stick to yacc anyway :) Grails related material was also quite entertaining – maybe that’s because I am recently into Groovy and stuff. Steve, by talking about Twitter and it’s experience with transition to JVM gives you nice overview of how to deal with big changes within the development process. Unfortunately he won’t provide you with lots of details. That’s a pity. As I already mentioned, Robert asks you quite controversial question: “why do you use the configuration at all?”. Which is quite intriguing one if you take his arguments into account.

Some of the videos didn’t make to catch my attention, maybe because I wasn’t interested with the topic in the first place. Some of them were really interesting and caught my attention from the beginning till the end. And some of them were just moderate. But one thing I can say for sure. Quality of the material is, as usual, at really high level. But, as I stated in summary – only for JVM hobbyists.

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