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Java 
This week Richard and myself will be visiting the IBM Rational Software Developer Conference (or RSDC for short). Like the name suggests, the conference is for people developing with IBM Rational related stuff. It's a pretty big conference on a nice location in Orlando. With over 3500 visitors and over 270 sessions, the schedule is packed. The conference is a lot less crowded than other conferences I visited, which is a good thing. A lot of the visitors are IBM people and product specialists as well, there is plenty of opportunities to talk about your favorite/hated Rational product X features and bugs.
With the first day nearing to an end, a lot of interesting stuff already passed by. Jazz is getting a lot of attention and several new products and upgrades are positioned around this new ALM platform. Team Concert, the basic Jazz powered project tooling, is shipping Real Soon Now and it will be interesting to see how the new capabilities and extension possibilities will be used. To me, Jazz seems likes the right move to further align the many, many different tools IBM is offering right now, and make them work more seamless. The other thing what's new about Jazz is that it is much more suitable for smaller teams. Most current Rational products are very clunky and big, and really need a big team to justify the added complexity of the tooling. Jazz brings a modular system that starts simple and enables stacking up tooling as a project becomes more complex.
With such a product-oriented conference, it is sometimes hard to cut through the featuritis and marketing to get some good info. Fortunately, there also some techy sessions and shows to keep geeks like me happy as well. The weather is great too. 🙂 All in all I am having a great time and look forward to the rest of this week!