| 2025 Java Conferences Galore Part 4 |
| Written by Nikos Vaggalis | |||
| Friday, 30 May 2025 | |||
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Continuing the series highlighting conferences you may have missed we come right up to date with Spring I/O and KotlinConf, both of which took place during May 2025. This series began with the prefix "Early" which has had to be changed now we are almost mid season. We're about to hit summer but that hasn't being put the lid on Java conferences.
Spring I/O 2025 took place in Barcelona between May 21-23 and is of course the leading conference focused on the Spring Framework ecosystem. Workshops, tracks, sessions and a solid list of Spring-famous speakers. What else could you ask for? The talks were aplenty, but just five are currently up on YouTube, Theu are:
From that lot, besides the opening Keynote which was about the forthcoming features of Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4, Dan Vega's "Code Smarter, Not Harder" is the stand out presentation. Inside a packed arena, he shared some of the workflows where he uses AI to make his day-to-day work more productive. While the focus of using AI by developers has been primarily on generating code, Dan, through real-world examples and live demonstrations, demonstrates how he uses it for both generating code and the rest of tasks a developer has to go through; documentation writing, collaborative programming, bug detection and automated refactoring, are just a few. Enlightenment through AI... "Bring back the joy in web development with HTMX and Hypermedia-Driven Applications" was the other eye-opening session. As HTMX is trending being heralded as the great web front end simplifi-cator in relation to the heavy weight SPA frameworks of React and Angular, Frederik Hahne goes to lengths to prove the point. His presentation looks at the central elements of hypermedia applications and how HTMX can implement typical patterns of modern web applications. In combination with modern template engines (Thymeleaf, JTE, JStachio), ‘full-stack development’ is once again possible and even fun! A joy to watch.
Now let's move to KotlinConf. KotlinConf this year run in parallel to Spring I/O but took place in Copenhagen. KotlinConf is of course the official conference of the Kotlin language run by JetBrains, the top community to gather and discuss all things Kotlin. Talks beside, it also consisted of quite a few full day workshops which run on the first day, such as:
The talks were all encompassing as well. For instance:
Unfortunately, the talks are not yet up apart from of the recording of the opening keynote, which is nevertheless important since it sets the future directions that the language will follow. Its main takeaway is that the language has matured and deemed a success thanks to its community embracing it. JetBrains is committed to enhance its Kotlin tools with AI, Juni for instance, which from the day one was made capable of solving real industrial professional tasks. The keynote had a big announcement too - the release of Kotlin 2.2.0 which is available as release candidate and stabilizes quite a few language features such as guard conditions. This was followed by detailing some of the new language features such as position destructuring and data classes, as well as justifying why Kotlin is great fit for Agentic AI applications. The keynote continued with introducing Kotlin multiplatform and went though all of the latest developments such as the brand new plug-in which you can use in your favorite IDE whether that's Intellij Idea or Android Studio to create multiplatform projects using the KMP wizard. A lot of focus was given on how Kotlin plays well along the Spring framework for building serverside applications on the JVM. With Kotlin you can just write Spring applications code easier with 100% Java interop; Kotlin and Java files happily coexist within the same package and you can seamlessly call from one language to the other. We also found out that tthere's a small but dedicated team that builds Spring extensions specific to Kotlin so that you can for instance build co-routines in Spring as natural as anywhere else that you write Kotlin for. And of course as Mike James's already covered, at KotlinConf JetBrains previewed VSCode Kotlin: JetBrains used the conference to show off a pre-alpha version of a new Kotlin extension for Visual Studio Code, along with an official Kotlin Language Server Protocol (LSP). Both are currently only accessible on GitHub. JetBrains says that although the extension is still in its early stages, it already includes basic support for code completion, navigation, inspections, quick-fixes, Java interoperability, and basic project import. The current version only supports Kotlin Gradle projects that are JVM-only. An Alpha release is planned for later this year. The gist of it is that Kotlin has matured, is used in production, is modern, and can be used to write multi-platform applications thanks to KMP. Lately it also put eyes the server side. Should Java be worried?
More InformationSpring I/O 2025 Bring back the joy in web development with HTMX and Hypermedia-Driven Applications KotlinConf
Related ArticlesEarly 2025 Java Conferences Galore Part 3 Early 2025 Java Conferences Galore Part 2 Early 2025 Java Conferences Galore Spring I/O 2024 Sessions Now Available Online JetBrains Previews VSCode Kotlin At KotlinConf
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