The biggest Java conference in Central America, Jconf Guatemala, was held on November 8th and 9th, 2019 by the Guatemala Java User Group –GuateJUG-. The conference, formerly known as Java Day Guatemala, gathered more than three hundred attendees from different countries like Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Perú, Colombia, Ecuador, and Honduras. The conference had a broad participation from local speakers along with various Java Champions, Ground Breakers, and developers advocates from the Industry.
JConf is an effort promoted by various Latin America Java User Groups to homogenise the yearly conferences organized in countries like Perú, Colombia, Domincan Republic, Ecuador and Guatemala. JConf Guatemala started on November 8th with an unconference and reception event. On November 9th the conference delivered more than 25 sessions distributed in four parallel tracks that covered the following topics:
- Java Platform
Covered topics related to the JVM as development platform including, Java Core, certifications, JVM internals, Java language, OpenJDK. - Alternative languages
Considering the Java Virtual Machine as a polyglot execution environment, this space provided sessions related with GraalVM, Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, JavaScript and beyond. - Server side development
Covered Java Enterprise development platform. Jakarta EE, Spring, Akka, Spark, Kafka, MicroProfile, RxJava, etc. - Client side development
Provided sessions related with JavaFX, HTML5+CSS+JS, Krazo, Vaadin, JSF, UI/UX. - Small and not so small Java
Java Embedded, SmartCards, Android, Arduino, Raspberry Pi and related iOT applications. - Big (Data with) Java
Introduced for the first time a space for Data Engineering with technologies like Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, Beam, Storm. - Tools, architecture and strategies
Covered technologies and process to improve code quality with topics like CI/CD, IDEs, DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, Blockchain, Hyperledger. - Startups with Java
Provided a space to openly share and learn with entrepreneurs, startups, and organizations from the IT sector that relies on Java technologies as part of their stack.
This year I participated along with José Díaz from Perú delivering the workshop “Developing Java based microservices with Eclipse MicroProfile”. The use cases presented by José, and his experience with enterprise software architectures, provided a value added for the attendees along with the latest and greatest Eclipse MicroProfile and Apache TomEE tips and tricks we shared to speed up the development of cloud-native microservices.
I want to thank the vibrant Guatemala Java user group for the organization of this event that over the past nine years keeps growing at a steady pace and provides a hub for Central and Latin America IT communities to gather, learn, and share.
