Jazoon is my favorite conference since it happens in Zurich when the days are long and the temperatures are more to my liking. Europe has many conferences organized by local Java User Groups (JUGs) and they all seem to have an ardent following. Jazoon is organized in a theater complex and although it seems like a strange setting to stand in front of the huge screen to talk, the venue is estremely friendly. There were about 5-6 tracks running concurrently. I got a bulk of the attendees during my time slot and was standing room only when I started my talk. All together there were probably 500+ attendees for my conference and my talk was attended by about 120+.

The understanding level amongst Java developers is quite varied. There were very few (about 6-8) attendees who had used Couchbase or CouchDB before. Accordingly, I spent some time talking about NoSQL (in retrospect I should have done a bit more), talked about the various operations, touched on document design and incremental map-reduce based views. All this was in relation to using them with the Java SDK and the simple, yet powerful APIs. I wish there is just a bit more time to cover a bit of Couchbase internals including VBuckets, how the replicas are organized, what happens during a rebalance, view collation and so on since there are many hard core Java delevelopers who would enjoy this level of detail although not necessary from an application developer viewpoint.

I covered some of the Couchbase Internals during the demonstrations and Q&A, but, there were quite a few high level questions as well such as how do we pick an application/component as a Proof-of-Concept for using Couchbase, is there a simple migration path from SQL to NoSQL and so on. There is still some confusion about Couchbase and CouchDB and admittedly we need to do a better job of making the similarities and the distinctions clear.

Based on the attendance, Q&A and the hallway conversations, I sense a very high interest for change from the business as usual in general and NoSQL in particular amongst Java developers. This bodes well for the adoption of NoSQL technologies and Couchbase.

Author

Posted by Raghavan Srinivas, Developer Advocate, Couchbase

Raghavan "Rags" Srinivas was a Developer Advocate at Couchbase getting his hands dirty with emerging technology directions and trends. His general focus area is in distributed systems, with a specialization in cloud computing. He worked on Hadoop and HBase during its early stages. He has spoken on a variety of technical topics at conferences around the world, conducted and organized Hands-on Labs and taught graduate classes in the evening. Rags brings with him about 20 years of hands-on software development and about 10 years of architecture and technology evangelism experience. He worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Intuit and Accenture. He has worked on several technology areas, including internals of VMS, Unix and NT to Hadoop and HBase. He has evangelized and influenced the architecture of a number of technology areas including the early releases of JavaFX, Java, Java EE, Java and XML, Java ME, AJAX and Web 2.0, Java Security and so on. Rags holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Center of Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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One Comment

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