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So, it’s thursday already… Time flies when you’re having fun! Final day of the conference starts off with another General Session led by Sun. This time it’s James Gosling taking the stage. Traditionally he shows some new and cool technology and demonstrations. You could tell tiredness kicked in, because I didn’t see half of the people walking around on Monday. Maybe some people wanted to head home early before the 4th of July holidays. Some heavy traffic was predicted when I turned on the tv in my hotelroom this morning. Maybe Camp Freddy was to blame too…can image people don’t want to leave their beds because they are still dreaming of Gina Gershon :o)
Alright, about the session now…before James’ part started John Gage had some more statistics to share with us like the conference attendees that had attended the most sessions, and the ones that had walked the greatest distance. Once again this data was collected off of our RFID enabled badges. Kind of funny was that there were people who attended 5 or even 6 sessions at once :o) Most populair session was still the session on Monday about Java Business Integration (JBI) with some others moving into the top 10. Final top 10 will probably be published online after the conference just as all the video and/or audio streams and presentations of the entire conference! After John’s facts and figures there was this cool demo about two virtual machines each running a Java application on both a Windows XP and a Mac. Then with an application console running from within NetBeans you could drag the applications from one machine onto another. When the applications were moved, the entire app was serialized and sent back and forth. Already this manual resource manangement was great but we were told that in the near future we can expect to see automated resource management since everybody nowadays has a Java enabled cellphone which all have some processing power. Maybe in the future applications will be so smart that they move around the network themselves looking for some free processing power to consume. This makes you think… hmmm maybe I’ve seen too much movies like Terminator and I, Robot ;o)
The show went on and James showed us some nice demonstrations of the power of realtime Java and the unmanned Boeing aircraft I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Unfortunately Moscone didn’t allow Boeing to fly the plane through the gigantic Hall D, but maybe that wasn’t such a great idea after all as the plane weighted approximately 40 kilos and you don’t want to crash that into your head ;o) Next was a story about sensors installed in the Bay Area to measure the water quality which was ofcourse also done using Java.
Then the final contestant of the tshirt hurling compo had their 5 minutes of fame. This time it was some good old medieval lumberjacking device ;o) The guy swinging the jackhammer looked like he had absolutely no clue about Java at all ;o) Anyway…he won, so in the end he did a good job.
Then off to some more serious stuff with a futurist panel taking the stage, moderated by John Gage. The panel consisted of some familiar Java guys like James Gosling, Bill Joy and Guy Steele among others. First half hour was really boring…in a previous JavaOne I experienced that listening to Bill Joy speaking is an enormous challenge by itself. The challenge is to stay awake ofcourse. Second part of the panel was way more interesting with some funny inside geek jokes:
“Google has way too much cash”…if everybody turns off their webservers we can live for a month off their cache… ;o)
After the general session I went to see the final technical sessions. Highlights were the new concurrency utilities in practice, data services in SOA and another interop session with Microsoft.
All in all it was a very good conference, with some interesting announcements made by various companies. Among the positive facts for me is that the conference really gave me the impression that Java is going strong these days and I mean no marketing fluff here, but really going strong. Some of the numbers mentioned in my posts are speaking the truth here I guess. This conference has been titled “The Power of Java” and I think we’ve seen it. On the negative side: with 15.000 people around and a bit more of a compressed schedule than before it has been very crowdy at some points in time. Too bad there isn’t a roundup session at the end either. Anyway, now it’s off to my hotel room to drop my conference backpack and head for a final round of shopping and a good night out before catching the plane home.