This was my fifth time speaking at ConFoo in Montreal. This year, there were around 800 attendees, which brings them close to the peak years before the pandemic. I am happy to see and experience the vibrant developer community in Montreal. The conference was originally a PHP conference, but now covers multiple languages and technologies. Of course, the ever present topic of AI was prevalent here as well this year. I had some very interesting discussions with Kito Mann and Andrew Lombardi among others.
Amazon offered 500 free credits for Kiro at their booth, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. Kiro offers spec-driven development, and it provided comprehensive high- and low-level designs, requirements, and associated tasks to implement them. First, I prompted it to create an MCP server for Jakarta EE. After about 200 credits, it delivered something. I am not sure if it is actually what I asked for, but it was pretty impressive.
My second try is still running. I gave it the task of providing an implementation of Jakarta Data 1.1 that will work with Apache OpenJPA and passes the TCK. It will be extremely interesting to see how this goes. I will write about it in the blog series about AI and Open Source that I started last week.
My first talk was The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. It is a good talk and usually gets positive reactions from the attendees. This was no exception. The feedback that was given on the analog paper feedback forms were very good.
The next day, I presented What Spring Developers Should Know About Jakarta EE. This is also a good talk, even if I am not as comfortable with it as the previous one. However, it was extremely well liked and got even better reviews from the attendees. I ran a little out of time at the end as the sessions at ConFoo are 45 minutes, so I am actually looking forward to giving it next week at Devnexus where I will have 60 minutes to my disposal.
On the last day, I had the pleasure of meeting Bazlur. As he pointed out in his post on X, ConFoo is where we meet up every other year when we both are speaking there. Always nice to meet our good community members in person.
