Friday, June 22, 2012

Uberconf 2012 themes, trends, observations

What's hot:

Mobile.  This market is growing explosively.  My dabbling in Android programming is OK for a hobby, but to seriously compete in this space you have to cover at least Android and IOS, IOS being the more important.  Solution is either stick to HTML5+CSS3+Javascript, losing some performance and device-specific capabilities, or go with a framework like PhoneGap or Titanium.

Javascript.  It's standardized and ubiquitous.  Javascript and AJAX will be the key to rich web content in the post-Flash world of HTML5.  No one wants to deal with the flaws (browser compatibility issues, for one) of plain vanilla Javascript, so there's an accelerating profusion of frameworks.  There's growing recognition that Javascript's lack of multithreading is a problem.

Gradle.  Gradle recently made it to release 1.0.  I have it in mind to learn more about this and start using it.  Too bad Spring is so joined at the hip with Maven these days, but I wouldn't be surprised if that changed soon.

NoSQL databases.

Conspicuously absent:

The big emphasis on concurrency and multithreading.

Book sales.

Round table discussion.

'No Fluff'... There was an actual vendor booth.  Gradleware is definitely one of the good guys, but this was still a conspicuous departure from the NFJS tradition.  Will this be the first step down a slippery slope?

Random observations:

The MacBook Pro is still a popular choice.

My impression was the presenters were more slack than in the past about having their slides ready on time.  Does this have to do with the iPads?  I suppose when the slides were being printed they had to be delivered earlier.  I liked not lugging the binder full of printouts around, but just having everything on the USB drive, on time, would have been fine with me.

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