One notable thing about Devnexus is that you are dragged into a whirlwind of activities and fun from the minute you disembark your plane at the beginning of the week until you board again at the end. It is exhausting, but so much fun!

It all started with the JUG Leaders Summit and the Java Champions Summit on Tuesday followed by two full conference days on Wednesday and Thursday. To top it up at the end, on Friday all speakers were invited to hang out and socialize in a Park with volleyball, football (both the real kind where you kick the ball and the American version with the oval ball), or just hanging out in the sun and talk with fellow community members. Later that evening we went Duckpin bowling. I’ll leave out the details here. It turns out that Java developers are not necessarily great bowlers…but we have fun doing it!

Just as last year, we had a dedicated Jakarta EE track on both days of the conference. I think this is a valuable thing to do for the community. It is good for visibility as it gathers all the content related to Jakarta EE in one room, so it doesn’t drown in the rest of the 13 parallel tracks.

I had the pleasure of opening up the Jakarta EE track with a talk on Wednesday morning directly after the keynote ended. I gave an overview of how to prepare for Jakarta EE 11 and what it means for your productivity as a developer and your applications’ performance.

I promised to go for a morning run every day during the conference and invited everyone awake to join me. It started slightly under par with skipping the Tuesday morning run due to heavy rain, but the rest of the week eager runners met up by the Olympic Rings for a 5K awakening run.

I rarely give online talks nowadays after getting an overflow of it during the pandemic. But sometimes, circumstances prevent travel, so online is the only option. That was the case with my talk at JDevSummitIL 2024. With reports of 250 attendees watching the talk, it must be deemed a success even if online talks are not optimal, neither for the speaker nor the audience.

I did the From Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with Java 2122 and Jakarta EE talk, which has been incredibly popular throughout 2023 and 2024. I guess I will keep submitting it to CFPs as long as it keeps getting accepted to conferences and user groups.

My first visit to Voxxed Days Bucharest was a pleasant experience with great keynotes and three parallel tracks filled with excellent content. With so many great speakers, the hallway track and speaker dinners are like conferences on their own.

I had a packed room for my talk From Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with Java 22 and Jakarta EE with an engaged audience and good questions after the talk. Check out the slides here.

In between the talks, we could join the sun in the atrium. No better place to write this blog than that. I also had some time for a walk around Bucharest in the nice, warm, sunny weather.

It was a great evening with the Belgian JUG in Hasselt yesterday, the first time in the Limburg area! The BeJUG tours different cities and regions in Belgium with an even every month. This is a great concept as it unites the Java communities in the different cities that works especially well in Belgium where each corner of the country is reachable within a couple of hours.

You can’t visit Belgium without having fries. This time they had food truck serving fries outside before the talks. First up was Simon Verhoeven who did a walkthrough of the new features in Java 22. Very well timed since Java 22 was released yesterday.

I upgraded in the hotel before heading to the event since I like to always be on the latest version. As expected, Jakarta EE 11 works fine on Java 22! I have done the talk Prepare for Jakarta EE 11 – Performance and Developer Productivity a couple of times now, but never exactly the same as I keep the slides and content aligned with the progress of the release.

The 2024 Jakarta EE Developer Survey is now open! Through this annual survey, we want to gather valuable insights into the needs, priorities, and requirements of the enterprise Java developer community. 

For the past seven years, we have collected insights from thousands of developers around the world that have helped the Jakarta EE Working Group foster an environment that supports the evolution and growth of cloud-native Java technologies.

The survey covers topics such as:
– Programming languages used alongside Java
– Usage patterns and migration plans
– Java applications in the cloud
– Architectural approaches for Java applications in the cloud
– Java frameworks and runtimes for cloud-native applications

In last year’s Jakarta EE Developer Survey, 17% of the respondents indicated that they had made the move to Jakarta EE 10. We are interested to see how this number has grown since then. 

We are also taking a look at which tools developers are using to migrate to Jakarta EE, such as the Apache Tomcat Migration Tool, Eclipse Transformer, and more.

Our community’s feedback is instrumental in guiding the development and improvement of Jakarta EE, ensuring it continues to meet and exceed the expectations of developers and organisations worldwide. Your feedback can lead to enhancements that directly benefit your projects and organisation.

This survey is open to all professionals who work with Java, regardless of their role, industry, or location. That’s why we are once again making the survey available in not just English, but also Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese. We encourage everyone from developers to operations managers, architects to C-level executives, to share their insights and experiences. Diverse perspectives will enrich the findings and help tailor Jakarta EE’s evolution to the community’s needs.

Take the 2024 Jakarta EE Developer Survey today!
Open Until: May 31, 2024

We deeply appreciate your time and insights. Together, we can continue to drive the success and innovation of cloud-native Java for enterprises around the globe.