I was in Paris end of last week, attending the first edition of Devoxx France, a Java developers’ conference.

Devoxx is a well known and highly attended Java developers conference that takes place late fall in Antwerp. The French version has been initiated by the Paris Java User Group and has a similar structure but with 75% of the talks in French.
For a first edition, Devoxx France 2012 is a real success. Sold out 2 weeks before the event, over 1200 persons attended the 3 days’ conference. Yet, the conference felt human.

I was there only for the second and third days, as an attendee and as a co-speaker in the BOF session about Open Source Software in France.It was also the opportunity to meet and discuss with other developers, open source project leaders and potential customers.

Out of the talks that I’ve attended, I preferred the ones that were quite low level. Among them, 2 around hacking the JVM and the bytecode:  

• Julien Ponge and Frédéric Le Mouel demonstrated how to generate or change JVM bytecode with different tools, like ASM, AspectJ, Byteman and JooFlux.
• Julien Viet did a quickie (a 15 minutes talk) presenting a tool and open source project he released : CraSH, an interactive shell for the JVM.

I also enjoyed 2 presentations by Alex Snaps, one around concurrency and the CompareAndSet method. The other one about SizeOf or the difficulty to compute the exact size of Java objects, in order to improve large cache efficiency and management. I shall look at the ehcache project code, to see if we can leverage some of it for OpenDJ caches.

Also worth mentioning, 2 greats keynotes on the Friday morning with Pat Chanezon and Neal Ford.

I’ve taken a few photos during Devoxx France 2012, feel free to use or share them (under Creative Commons). And if you want to see more photos of the event, you can check Arnaud Heritier’s collections : Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

See you next year at Devoxx France 2013, and may be in Antwerp in November for Devoxx (WorldWide)