Location Based Services: Latitude, Longitude and BEYOND was obviously a talk I had to attend since we use similar technologies at work. Most of the presentation was an overview of OpenLS and related concepts so it was nice to see this from another perspective. I am glad to see that a standardization exists for that kind of technology (JSR 293).

Java for high performant 3D and 2D graphical applications was presented by Luciad,  a belgian-based company that is working on the same area as Ionic so I was very interested to see what they have to propose in the talk. The talk was full of advices about 2D and 3D rendering as well as realtime-like applications. Very interesting.

OSGi has been around for a while now so I really hoped that the OSGi, the future of Java? talk would provide a complete introduction and answered the few questions I had. In theory, what OSGi provides is almost a must have for the Java virtual machine altogether: ability to have application scopes, use different versions of a particular library, ability to communicate between applications, component lifecycle callbacks (start& stop), ability to hide internal implementations, etc. What is a bit scary about OSGi is that it is a layer on top of the virtual machine and should therefore be supported by the application server in which you deploy your OSGi bundles. For a desktop application this is an easy choice though.

Test Driven Development: Beyond the Acronyms was a no choice for me since I’ve been used to Test Driven Development for a while now and I wanted to see if I apply the principle the right way. Well, it can be improved! Half of the session was a live coding demo with some guy from the audience, very nice.