NFJS 2014

My uber-cool employer is sending me to No Fluff Just Stuff.

This will be the 10th anniversary of my first time in 2004.

Hot topics in 2004 were dependency injection, object-relational mapping and web frameworks (which in those days meant primarily server-side).  Dave Thomas and Bruce Tate were among the speakers.  SOAP was alive and well and there were lots of XML-related talks.  Agile methodologies were new and exciting.

Some specific presentation topics included Spring, Hibernate, JDO, Struts, JSF, Tapestry, Ruby, Groovy, AOP.

It was totally mind-blowing for me.  My Java experience leading up to this was Tomcat, JBoss and Struts.  I thought EJBs and J2EE were the pinnacle of advanced enterprise Java.  I had tried Struts but reverted back to JSP for web development.  Back then I thought JavaScript was suitable only for cheesy effects that no serious developer would use.

I went on to use Tapestry in a project within the next year.  This was the coolest Java web framework of 2005 (you could use components that encapsulated JavaScript functionality without knowing anything about JavaScript!) but it didn't do well in the years that followed and is almost forgotten now.

Spring, Hibernate and Groovy had a big influence on me and (along with Grails) these are what I'm mostly working in today.

So, in 2004, NFJS exposed me to many ideas that were new and even revolutionary.  It also made me realize that I had been in a complacent backwater and was ignorant of a wide world of innovation going on outside the confines of my narrow career.

Comparing that with the program for this year, I can't help feel a little disappointed.  And I hasten to say this is no reflection on the NFJS presenters and organizers.  But the awesome creative ferment of a decade ago seems to have spent its force.

The one thing on the agenda that is somewhat new is Microservices.  There's plenty of good stuff. even the usual tough choices where more than one presentation I'd like to see are being offered at the same time.  But, there's not much here that is new since my last visit to Uberconf 2 1/2 years ago.

Did the excitement and innovation go elsewhere?  Is the whole industry in a slump?

The conventional wisdom lately has been that the actual Java language has become the COBOL of the 2010s, however lots of cool new languages like Groovy, Clojure and Scala run on the JVM. and the next big thing was probably going to involve a JVM-based language, possibly a functional language that would solve the concurrency problem.  I've been hearing this for about 4 years now and nothing much seems to be happening... these languages thrive in their little niches but there is no revolution.

Well, perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic and something from this NFJS is getting ready to knock my socks off.  Or, I'm just at a stage in my development where I don't need to be chasing the latest new thing so much as deepening my command of existing tools and frameworks.  I think I could spend the rest of my life mastering Spring framework and all the additional Spring projects.  Do we really just have enough of this stuff to the point where new languages and frameworks become superfluous?