The sixth JAX London, which kicks of on Monday 28th October, promises to bring an exceptionally strong kick of Java to the UK, with industry leaders, community fun, scintillating talks, productive workshops, and more. With the clock ticking until doors open, we thought we’d catch up with our keynoters for a sneak preview of what’s to come. First up is Typesafe’s Jamie Allen, who will be speaking at both the main event, as well as the Community Night on Tuesday 29th.
JAXenter: Tell us a little bit about yourself – what led you to your current role?
Jamie: I’m the Director of Consulting for Typesafe, the company behind the Scala language, Akka concurrency toolkit and Play Framework for web development. I have been programming actors in Scala since 2009 as a consultant, and was fortunate enough to be asked to join Typesafe 1.5 years ago.
Can you give us a sneaky preview of what you’ll be talking about at JAX London? Who do you think will best benefit from coming to hear you speak?
I will be discussing some pitfalls of using lambdas in various languages on the JVM, focusing primarily on Java 8 and Scala, and providing best practices to help developers write lambdas that are testable, debuggable and maintainable. Anyone who writes code targeting the JVM will benefit from my talk.
What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?
Really looking forward to Peter Lawrey’s high performance Java workshop. I think everyone benefits from understanding tricks such as those he employs to wring maximum performance out of applications deployed on a JVM. His approach has costs such as threads pinned to cores, and and are not necessarily for use in all applications. So, for me, the key is understanding when to employ his tactics.
You’re known for coding in Scala – what keeps you interested in the language?
The language continues to evolve, and I continue to learn as a programmer as a result. There is always a new area for me to explore.
What do you predict for the future of Java?
I think the days of any one language thoroughly dominating the JVM may be coming to an end, and that applications will be more polyglot in nature. Services and components will be written using the language that best suits the problem they solve. This is a good thing, in my opinion. Java will continue to be an important language, but other languages that make it easier to write applications that scale to utilize the platforms of the future will gain share.
