Here it is, my last day at the summit and therefore in San Francisco.

I am here blogging from the San Francisco airport (SFO if you are IATA-code oriented) – let me tell you about this last day.

No keynote this time. One directly goes to individual presentations right after the breakfast (which was quite late in the morning compared to the other days). The summit ended at lunch time, so I could only attend two presentations and I have chosen presentation from the DevNation track.

Java Puzzlers: Something old, something Gnu, something bogus, something blew, Josh Bloch & Bob Lee

This session was really fun. The two guys on stage really made the audience excited. They were funny and very good.

What did they do, they went through 9 Java puzzles, i.e. snippet of Java codes, and asked the audience what it would print on the screen for each of them. And of course, what the audience expected was never what it actually outputs and then they explain why it was like this, and what is the moral (best practices) which should be drawn from thqt (e.g. be symetrical in your serialization/deserialization operations, be consistent in your APIs, be careful with autoboxing…).

I won’t cover the puzzles I saw there, because they are probably in a book of one of the presenter – that I will probably try to borrow (or steal, or buy if there is no other choice). Mostly they were about collections, circular initialization, inconsistent API, nasty Java language features, autoboxing…

I’m too busy to deal with security, Bill Burke

This second and last session was also very interested. In fact, Bill Burke mainly talked about the project he is working on: Keycloack.

I found this presentation very interested because Keycloak is what we are trying to achieve at work for the Airport IT products I am working on. Keycloak is brand new and not finished (version 1.0 is targeted for June and it lacks important feature like high avaliability), ours is not complete either, but I can say we all share the same raodmap.

What does Keycloak try to achieve? According to the presentation, it is an authentication server, which manages the session and on top of which it is easy to add features like: signin with an external account like Google, two-factor authentication, password forgot, registration, remember me….

Keycloak also manages the user sessions and therefore can provide SSO in a SOA environment. It also provides “single sign off” so that if a user session has expired, the user is logged off everywhere. It does this by generating authentication token (based on JWT) and appear to be secure to handle Cross-origin requests.

Then, it is for me definitely a project to have a close look at.

End of the day and return to France

After a final lunch (some lunch box), the Red Hat Summit was over.

The return flight is in the evening so I had some time in the afternoon to explore San Francisco one last time. I went with my colleague up to the north to see the Golden Gate bridge from a closest point (next to the palace of fine arts). The weather was very nice. Going there, walking and going to the airport took us a good amount of time.

I will now board soon to the plane. Final thoughts on the summit: it was a great experience, lots of interesting people, lots of promising technologies that we should have a look at, and most of all open source rocks.

Red Hat Summit 2015 will be in Boston.

Now I should board to the 11-hour-long flight going back to Europe… See you.