new Meetup("Sep 2018")

It was a rainy and windy day (September 27th 2018) when JHUG started the meetups for the new season 2018/2019. We, the organizers of JHUG, were a bit anxious whether people will attend. It was the first meetup and the weather was bad. However it was an excellent start. Java apps may suffer sometimes from slow booting but Java meetups do not have such problems. We estimated that about 100 people, most of them newcomers, attended the meetup. This is very encouraging and sets a high bar we will try to cross.

The meetup was held in the premises of The Hub Events and was sponsored by Accenture. Markos Fragkakis welcomed the attendants on behalf of JHUG and wished for a good season with a lot of Java. He then passed the word to Nicolas Moschatos the HR Manager of Accenture. He welcomed the JHUG members and stated Accenture’s satisfaction and commitment to Java technology, their support for JHUG and their pursuit to collaborate with talented engineers. A team of HR stuff and engineers were active during the meetup discussing career opportunities with the attendants.

After the introductions the talks started.

An overview of IntelliJ IDEA - Zisis Pontikas - Slides

Zisis chose to talk about the latest version of the best and most popular IDE for JVM based platforms. He did a quick chronology of IDEA and the milestones of its development. Then we proceed to do live demos including

  • project organization
  • build tools integration
  • git integration
  • code refactoring
  • code test and coverage
  • spring boot integration
  • live templates

It was a big task for the 45 minutes but he did fine. New users were surely challenged to have a look at IDEA while old user learned some new tricks and felt justified for the time they devoted to learn the tool. You can watch the full video below.

Break

After the talk there was the essential break for food, beer and networking in no particular order of significance. This time is was very important because the newcomers were many and a lot of acquaintances were made. Also there was a lot of ideas and suggestions for future meetups. During this break there was also a draw for 2 IDEA ultimate licenses offered by JetBrains.

Microservices architecture in action - Giannis Kormaris - Slides

The second talk by Yannis was about software architecture. Microservices are trending these days but still there isn’t an acceptable definition of what constitutes a microservices architecture. This talk contributed to the ongoing dialogue. Yannis presented a general overview of what is such an architecture and when applicable he become very specific with concrete examples from projects he had worked on. It was very valuable that all examples were from personal experience and that was justified in the Q&A section(more later). The topics addressed were:

  • monolith vs microservices
  • complex business domain
  • services API
  • business capabilities
  • scalability
  • error handling
  • distribution of services
  • deployment

and much more.

Technology wise he showed a bias towards RabbitMQ and OpenShift, which he called Kubernetes on steroids, and he discussed a bit about their technical merits.

This talk concluded with a good Q&A section in which proponents of monolithic apps and monolithic packaging argued about code structure, distributed transactions, performance penalties, easiness of testing etc. Surely, if the time hadn’t passed we would have stayed and talked about these the whole night. You can watch the full video below.

The hidden talk

Yannis mentioned in his talk that he attendend a JHUG meetup some years ago and was inspired by a talk by Kostis Kapelonis Package By Feature. He considered the organization proposed there a good template for organizing code for a microservice. You can find the original talk at JHUG 2010, along with a revised version of it at Oracle Java Day 2014 here

.next()

To conclude it was a very interesting meetup and a very promising start. We are looking forward to worthy followups. All talks were recorded in video and will be released soon for those who weren’t able to attent. At the meetup page, here, there is a photo gallery from the meetup.

.join()

You can learn news about JHUG, participate and exchange ideas and feedback via our channels:

News about meetups and other events are published in all these channels but the interesting discussions are on slack. If you are not there, consider joining.

See you at the next meetup. Until then keep coding.

This post was written by Spyros Anastasopoulos
Written on September 30, 2018