JavaPolis

A conversation with Stephen Janssen, founder and active member of JavaPolis

JavaPolis is a website destination and an annual conference in Belgium for Java developers. Both were founded by Stephan Janssen to bring European Java developers together. Gaining instant interest, the conference has grown to over 2,800 attendees in a just a few years. Today, the website, which runs on Atlassian Confluence, has over 20,000 registered web visitors. Atlassian is proud to donate their wiki to this non-profit, Java event.

What is Javapolis?

JavaPolis is an annual conference organised by the Belgium Java User Group (BeJUG). It takes place in a large cinema complex in Antwerp, Belgium during the second week of December. For five days, about 100 speakers talk about Java APIs, frameworks, products, etc. It's also a great event to network and socialize with other Java developers.

Last year, our fifth edition, had about 2,800 people attending from 50 countries. We're growing with 30-50% more attendees every year! Now JavaPolis is officially the second biggest Java conference in the world after JavaOne.

Why did you start JavaPolis?

I saw an opportunity to start a conference for European Java developers. In 1997, I started a Java User Group (BeJUG) and five years later, I started an annual conference with that user group as an alternative to JavaOne, which is very expensive for Europeans and others not already in the U.S. The only big difference with JavaOne is that our entrance fee is very low. We're only asking Euros 200 for the conference compared to about US$1500 at JavaOne.

How do you financially support the event, especially with such a low attendee fee?

One of the objectives I had when I started JavaPolis was to make the entrance fee as low as possible. To create this balance, we have about 40+ different companies who sponsor JavaPolis every year and with that revenue we're able to organise JavaPolis and have the entrance fee as low as it is today.

"From a customisation point of view the sky's the limit — you can push Confluence far. Your imagination, time and energy are your only limitations." Stephan Janssen of JavaPolis

 

Why use a wiki as the event's website and communication portal?

When I started a user group in '97, I tried different approaches for our website (www.JavaPolis.com). First I started with just Tomcat, a simple web server with static pages.

Then I tried out a commercial portal a couple years later, but I rapidly found out that the portal promise didn't meet my expectations. It didn't have lots of mini portlets that could be used to create a collaborative environment.

So, again, I started looking at alternatives. I really wanted to use a Java solution for our website, not a PHP-type of content management system. For a Java user group conference you really have to eat our own dog food.

Coincidently, I ran into Confluence, probably one of its first versions. It was more or less love at first sight — both from the technology choices that Atlassian at that time had taken, like Spring framework, but also the content management support was already more than sufficient for us.

I viewed Confluence not only as a wiki but also a way to attach our documents and our talks, allowing us to index these PDFs and so forth. From that point onward, every year we've been pushing it to a new level where we want to use the wiki in different ways than the more traditional way people are using Confluence. I think back then we were one of the few who used Confluence for a public internet website.

"From a wiki perspective the social control actually results in ideal content control" Stephan Janssen of JavaPolis

 

How did people react when you said you were moving the site to a wiki?

During a JavaPolis partner-sponsors meeting, we announced that we were going to use a wiki for the website. A lot of the companies were very skeptical about it. Can't anyone just change it? Will that work? they asked. I had to convince them that there is social control in a wiki because of all the people who use it and the many who receive notifications and so on.

Of course we can't guarantee there won't be a crazy guy who wants to do something aberrant, but with wikis you can always roll back to the previous version or the community can just remove it or adjust it and I must say that works really nice.

So anyone can edit the site?

Anyone who is registered can do whatever change they want to on the JavaPolis site. If someone makes an unwanted change, hundreds of other users are notified and can fix the problem. From a wiki perspective the social control actually results in ideal content control.

Wikis can be more interactive than other websites. What are some of the ways that the JavaPolis website is more interactive than other typical conference websites?

First of all, the speed that I can tune Confluence to reflect what I want from the look and feel is amazing. In addition I can easily develop small plugins that give me any Web 2.0-ish features in a few hours.

For example, the interactive speakers list displays data about each speaker on the schedule. This functionality was developed using the Confluence Metadata Plugin to record additional data about each speaker, and the Overlib Popup Macro to display the extra data when you mouse over each speaker's name. This entire feature was completed in less than one hour!

How else has the JavaPolis site developed over the past few years?

There are 2 answers to this question — both the evolution of Confluence and then the way we have used Confluence. Specific to the site development, we first hooked up with Adaptavist, an Atlassian partner in the UK, and they really moved us to the next level of customisation of Confluence. This really opened my eyes. Since then I started looking at how I can write macros, and develop plugins and really customise Confluence in such a way that you could hardly see it is still Confluence running behind the scenes. From a customisation point of view the sky's the limit — you can push Confluence far. Your imagination, time and energy are your only limitations.

How have you customised the JavaPolis site?

I've created several plugins over the years for JavaPolis. One was a flash plugin, a very simple one. A more advanced one is called the Overlib macro, which we use on the speaker overview page. When you move the curser over a speaker's picture some html pops up giving you more information in a customised popup screen so you don't have to drill into the speaker page. That's using metadata so it actually gets all the attachments of the child pages and then shows the different pictures in an overview, which his really great.

When I finished that one, I got really excited about some more dynamic features. Two months before JavaPolis 2006, I started investigating if I could start using Confluence for a new idea I had, which was Parleys, a video streaming environment where people can re-experience the talks from JavaPolis, SpringOne and Java user group events. Parleys is a complete customised Confluence environment using the Adaptavist Theme Builder and several sophisticated plugins developed by myself.

"Were running into almost 5-6,000 hits per day (top 10,000). Confluence is behaving very nicely with this load." Stephan Janssen of JavaPolis

 

How else have you added value to the site by taking advantage of the interactive nature of the wiki?

Last year we used an event plugin called 'meetups' that lets people set up their own sessions and events onsite at the conference. People can browse and sign up to attend the events here.

We also publish the presentation slides on the site. People have to register in order to view them. On our homepage, we also have RSS feeds created by a special engine that lists all the sites and articles that mention the word "JavaPolis". This provides a continuous flow of new links to sites that talk about JavaPolis and so that's a way to get some fresh content.

Another way the site gets visitors is that when I publish free talks on Parleys, I put a small picture of that talk on the homepage of JavaPolis. This is a nice way to keep people informed of any talks just recently published to Parleys, too.

The Parleys site looks great! Tell us more about how it works.

Parleys itself is more or less a combination of YouTube focused on technical talks where you actually see the videos of the speakers, sequenced with the slides and sequenced with the table of contents where you can get more info on the speakers and the presentation. Visitors can select a specific area from the table of contents and the video plays accordingly.

I released Parleys at JavaPolis last year. It already has about 60 talks published and we're getting hammered by visits. People vote on their favourite talks to get an idea of what people like and dislike. We're running into almost 5-6,000 hits per day (top 10,000). Confluence is behaving very nicely with this load.

How do you prepare the JavaPolis site for the event every year?

Every year JavaPolis has a new, fresh theme with its own colours, setup, look and feel. And because of that tradition I prepare the JavaPolis site internally allowing the steering members to see how it's going to look like and then, of course, every year I want to introduce new things, new features, new look and feel new techniques to present the data and introduce new liabilities to do this. And if you start building up this expertise you really start knowing Confluence inside and out and you can actually push it to the new level.

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  JavaPolis 2005
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  JavaPolis 2006
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  JavaPolis 2007

For example, a feature I wanted to include this year doesn't come out-of-the-box. If you select speaker, I want you get a nice speaker header image. If you choose sponsors, you get a picture in the header that links to the header. I was able to do this by writing a specific plugin. So Confluence on that level is very, very flexible, I can do whatever I want because it gives me a platform and lets me very rapidly develop applications in whatever look and feel and behaviour that I want.