Year 2017 overview : Duke's Choice Award and more... move on to 2018

Picture taken by Neo

Hi everyone,
  the year 2017 ends soon... so we would like to do a brief summary about what we have achieved. Before we move on, we would love to thank all our fans and supporters, it was an amazing year for the Robo4J project! 

The first and great achievement was winning the Duke's Choice Award 2017 for Java ecosystem innovation. The Robo4J Team feels very honored to hold this award! 

The next milestone was the well accepted presentation at JavaOne 2017: "From Concept to Robotic Overlord with Robo4J". We felt again very honored also about the big audience and we were very happy to answer so many question that came up after the session. 

A few weeks after JavaOne we were holding our next presentation at Devoxx Belgium 2017. The presentation: "Much Robots, Very Java so IoT". Although our time slot was a way shorter then at JavaOne, the audience was very big and amazing. We were grateful again! Hopefully next time we can build some cool IoT stuff on stage when we get a bigger time slot. :)

Although it was a very busy time due to ordinary jobs and preparations for all conferences we have moved Robo4J project forward:

1. Robo4J has native JSON support for http socket communication
    JSON native support allows to talk with Robo4J systems only by defining traditional Java Classes and the developer doesn't need to care much about anything else. Such classes are automatically serialized/deserialized behind the scene. This feature allows Robo4J to be connected with any other system that uses JSON type of communication. The developer gets at the same time advantages from the strongly typed langue. It makes socket codecs definitions very simple. See the example bellow ...more is coming next year 2018 :

2. Robo4J SNAPSHOT build alpha-3.0.0 available for Everyone! 
A few days ago we have published the Robo4J SNAPSHOT  release. It allows every developer to simply import the Robo4J binaries directly to the project by using the Maven or Gradle build system. Here we have published a simple Gradle example that initiates the basic Robo4J system : github project

And that's basically all for this year! 
For the next year the Robo4J team is already "cooking" some surprises, not only with Java Mission Control and Flight Recorder (thanks to Marcus Robo4J has the native support for it since the very early beginning) but also some very cool features according to sockets and network communication... And it is still not all ;) 

Stay tuned and Happy New Year 2018!
Robo4J Team!