SpringOne 2GX 2010 Day 1: Keynote

Just returned from the first day of the SpringOne 2GX 2010 conference held at The Westin Lombard Yorktown Center in the heart of the Lombard / Oak Brook, Illinois business corridor. The complete session schedule for the week (Tuesday evening through Friday afternoon) is located here.

From the conference materials:

SpringOne 2GX is a one-of-a-kind conference for application developers, solution architects, web operations and IT teams who develop, deploy and manage business applications. This is the most important Java event of 2010, especially for anyone using Spring technologies, Groovy & Grails, or Tomcat. Whether you're building and running mission-critical business applications or designing the next killer cloud application, SpringOne 2GX will keep you up to date with the latest enterprise technology.

Featuring over 100 presentations delivered by development leads and published authors on the Spring, Groovy/Grails, Tomcat and Cloud technology today, it's the ideal place to obtain critical skills to help you build, run and manage tomorrow's software solutions. Plus you'll meet and learn from open source leaders who drive innovation for these technologies.

There exist several different tracks of sessions during the conference this week, and several work colleagues and I will be attending sessions during various periods of time that interest us both professionally and personally. For example, I am personally interested in sessions pertaining to moving applications to VMware products due to the virtualization work I am performing at my current client.

This evening I attended the dinner and follow-up keynote address led by Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework. Johnson is currently General Manager of the SpringSource Division of VMware (SpringSource was acquired by VMware in 2009). Along with Johnson, a few other individuals spoke directly to specific products within and around the SpringSource lineup to provide a preview of the sessions.

According to Johnson, there are twice the number in attendance this year than last year. The three platinum sponsors this year are SalesForce, Google, and Accenture. During his presentation, Johnson commented through a series of slides that it was especially difficult to arrive at a theme for his keynote address, due to the high amount of activity in the last year and a 60-75 minute limit.

Of course, Johnson was working up to a theme that he had already chosen, but the short-lived suspense was a winning formula for the time he had available to do so. In working up to the theme, Johnson indicated that the keynote could have been about any of a number of topics: VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform, GemStone GemFire Enterprise Data Fabric, the software associated with the recently announced UID for 1.2 billion Indians that utilizes RabbitMQ, Spring Insight in tc Server and integrated within SpringSource Tool Suite, Grails, GORM (which is being extended to support non-relational databases, resulting in a possible name change), Spring Framework 3.1, Spring Web Flow 3.0, and / or Spring Integration 2.0.

However, in searching for a topic, Johnson came upon the realization that the Spring Framework is almost 10 years old after discovering that RequestHandledEvent is the oldest class in the Spring Framework, dating to January 17, 2001. Because of this, Johnson arrived at the following theme: "Spring: Toward the Second Decade".

Johnson repeated the refrain throughout the opening keynote that Spring core values have always been portability, productivity, and innovation. Portability in the past essentially pointed to choice of application server to which to deploy, and over time it became clear that Apache Tomcat was the most popular choice. However, Johnson indicated that we need to view portability in the present day more broadly.

Spring abstracts business logic away from the deployment environment. According to Johnson, we need to think about increase in productivity in terms of both the development stack as well as the process that is used for that development (Grails and Spring Roo were sited during this part of the discussion). We need to address how developers work, to be effective throughout the application life cycle.

Lead developer of SpringSource Tool Suite (STS), Christian Dupuis, followed this discussion with a demonstration of Grails development using STS, to which he commented that STS provides Grails development efficiency far greater than what was available two years ago. Apple afficianados might be interested in knowing that yes, he used a MacBook for the demonstration.

Johnson then discussed two recent developments available with Spring Roo 1.1: database reverse engineering and GWT development through SpringSource collaboration with Google (to which Johnson also commented that there are present many Google developers at the conference). The database reverse engineering made available uses only standard (i.e. non-implementation specific) JPA annotations, and supports round-tripping so that only pertinent changes are made to the code when the database changes.

After a brief mention of the Spring Payment Services project, Johnson reiterated that innovation has always been important to Spring, and indicated that "the world of IT is fundamentally changing". Requirements have changed because among other things it is not about the traditional browser anymore, and there are are higher expectations with responsiveness. And tying into the underlying marketing theme of the conference, Johnson quipped that "Spring is the Java programming model for the Cloud".

A demonstration of SpringSource Greenhouse, apparently a reference application driven by Spring products, was then given, although a portion of the demonstration did not work due to lack of network connectivity. According to the presenter, the entire Greenhouse stack consists of Apache licensed software, and the client is now available via the iPhone App Store.

After the demonstration, Johnson returned to discuss the support for NoSQL databases by Spring Data, and provided a reminder that NoSQL no longer means "no SQL" but instead "not only SQL", to which I was reminded of the claim by Sun that JDBC officially does not stand for "Java Database Connectivity". Spring Data provides support, for example, for different types of data other than that residing in relational databases, such as key-value, column / BigTable, document, and graph.

Johnson discussed Neo4j partially because of the his code contributions to the product. He briefly touched on the fact that there exists trade-offs between different types of data stores, mentioned that Neo4j is "very high performance", and that its sweet spot revolves around social networking, bioinformatics, fraud detection, and MDM (although no detail was provided behind any of these applications).

The CEO of Tasktop Technologies discussed the missing links that his product provides, as well as the Code2Cloud service to be provided by VMware that link the developer desktop (Grails, Roo, STS), software development lifecycle (source control, issue tracking, builds, continuous integration), and cloud deployment. The CEO indicated that the time spent configuring software can be high, and although it might be fun at first, developer time can be better spent delivering business value rather than worrying about infrastructure. The GA for Code2Cloud is planned for 2011, with a forthcoming developer preview.

Johnson concluded by communicating to attendees that while Spring is tackling new challenges in a changing IT world, the mission of Spring remains unchanged.

The following are some additional photos I took during dinner while the conference halls were empty.