Q&A: App Dev Trends Live Preview with Java Maven Kito Mann

The debut of AppDev Trends 2016, our first-ever industry conference, is less than a month away! We're part of the very popular Live! 360 conference, scheduled for Dec. 5-9 at Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando. This is a multi-conference event that includes Visual Studio Live!, SQL Server Live!, Office/SharePoint Live!, Modern Apps Live!, TechMentor -- and us.

We've been planning this thing for nearly a year, and we've put together an awesome schedule of sessions and keynotes. As I mentioned in a previous post, we're bringing something to this event that's been largely missing in years past: serious Java. Reza Rahman, one of the chief drivers behind the Java EE Guardians, is giving our keynote, and a number of well-known Java experts will be leading sessions.

I had the pleasure of hosting a webcast last month, in which one of our presenters, Kito D. Mann, gave attendees a taste of the three sessions he will be leading at the Orlando event.

Like I said: serious Java.

Kito is a popular and frequent speaker and session leader. His talks and presentations have been on the agendas of ... well ... a bunch of other conferences we need not mention here. The important thing is, he'll be leading three sessions at AppDev Trends 2016:

• PrimeFaces 6: Modern UI widgets for Java EE, which covers the core PrimeFaces components and the key new features in PrimeFaces 6.
• Full Stack Java with JSweet, Angular 2, PrimeNG and JAX-RS, which explores how to build an application using modern front-end technologies using Java for both the front-end and back-end.
• Who's Taking out the Garbage, which takes a deeper look at how Garbage Collection works in the JVM.

I talked with Kito at the end of the webcast about a couple of his sessions.

PrimeFaces, the open-source UI component library for JavaServer Faces (JSF), has become a de facto standard for JSF component libraries. Version 5 was a major update, and version 6 had 345 new features components and enhancements. Is this tech on track, and what would you like to see in the next update?
It's definitely on the right track. What amazes me is that something so mature and with so many features that there's still more to add. If you look at 6.06, which just came out, it has things like a brand new text editor, and some enhancement to the exporter, which is a popular feature used for exporting PDF and CSV files. One of the things I've worked with the PrimeTek team on a lot over the last few years is accessibility. There's probably still a bit of work left to do there, but really not that much. And I'd also like to see a little more functionality around the exporter.

I loved the slide of the guy from Columbia you used to underscore the global popularity of PrimeFaces. How do you account for that popularity?
Among other things, it came out right around the same time as JSF 2 -- which was a huge upgrade -- and so it didn't have any of the baggage associated with older versions of JSF. It came right out of the gate with support for all the new JSF 2 features. Also, a lot of it has to do with Cagatay Civici (the founder of PrimeFaces), who is an awesome guy, and just really fast. He's all about constantly developing and putting stuff out there.

I though what you said about Angular being the 800-pound gorilla of Web development, especially given the big rewrite that is Angular 2, was very interesting. How would you characterize the impact of this rewrite?
I'm amazed at the number of people already working with it, especially since it just came out, and it kept breaking some compatibility between release candidates, which I'm not used to seeing. You had people asking, do I rewrite in Angular 2 or do I move to another framework. Hopefully now it's pretty stable in terms of the API. And a lot of people are going to stick with it, because it has a lot of backing and it's a really powerful framework.

The entire webcast is available now online.

Posted by John K. Waters on November 9, 2016