I attended NFJS conference over the weekend. It was a short conference from Friday, Sep 6 to Sunday, Sep 8. It had a number of sessions on Java 8, Javascript, Mobile, and functional areas. Here are some of the sections that I enjoyed:
Java 8 Language Capabilities
This session gave a brief overview of new features of Java 8 mainly new closure/lambda syntax. Venkat is a great speaker and he was coding live throughout the session.
Concurrency without Pain in Pure Java
This was related to first talk by Venkat Subramaniam and covered a number of patterns such as Actors and STM for concurrency.
Functional SOLID
In this talk Matt Stine gave overview of SOLID principles and how functional programming make it easier to apply these patterns. This was more abstract talk and didn’t go into examples of those patterns.
Programming with Immutability
This was more practical talk by Matt Stine and he gave examples of immutability and functional programming in Java and Groovy with live coding. He mentioned a number of tools that can make it easier to build mutable and immutable pair of classes and how immutable classes can be used in other frameworks such as Hibernate.
Rich Web Apps with Angular
This was a short introduction to Angular by Raju Gandhi.
Vagrant: Virtualized Development Environments Made Simple
This was a great introduction to Vagrant and how to setup a complete development, testing and production environments on your local desktop.
Simulation Testing with Simulant
This was a short introduction to Simulant testing library that Stuart Halloway has been using for testing Datomic database. This testing library can be used for functional testing and load testing. It saves all data in datomic database and can be populated from existing data.
Generative Testing
This was another session of testing framework by Stuart Halloway. This framework provides great support for generating test data and is somewhat similar to QuickCheck, though it doesn’t offer reduction.
Summary
I didn’t go to OSCON this year and enjoyed smaller pavilion that NFJS provided. There were a couple of dud sessions, but overall I enjoyed it.