JavaOne 2007 – Day 1 - Conference Kick-off

I once again have the privilege of attending JavaOne in San Francisco. This morning the official day 1 general session kicked off and with it comes 81 hours of JavaOne. If you’ve been there before, it’s easy to tell what the first 20 minutes of the conference were like. If you’ve never been there, imagine John Gage, head researcher of Sun Microsystems having his yearly rant on meeting people and being a Brazilian. If you happen to be there like 6 times before, like me, then the kick-off tends to be a little annoying. But as soon as those 20 minutes had passed, things got interesting. Very interesting! The keynote was exciting and entertaining. Something it hadn’t been in the past few years. The 2 hour show was designed along some major announcements. It had music, videos and some interesting speakers making it a very entertaining show to watch. The larger part of it contributed to the “Community, community, community” thing and the open sourcing of Java as was to be expected. With a symbolic announcement mail Rich Green, VP of Software, declared the open sourcing of Java and the OpenJDK project to be finalized as of today. I think the main message from this conference is the “Open equals Possibilities” quote. And indeed, open it is. Ranging from cell phones, to Glassfish, to Blu-ray, Java is everywhere and couldn’t be more opened up than it is today.

Then came the major announcement of the show. JavaFX. What is it? I can’t get myself of the idea that it is a total rip-off of what another company tends to call Flex and Flash. That same company, being a serious sponsor of previous JavaOne shows, was nowhere to be seen. Strange? I think not. JavaFX is THE new kid on the block and regarding the amount of spotlight it gets is the new horse Sun bets on. If by now you still have no clue what I’m talking about: think script, think scripting language for RIA, think formerly known as F3 (form follows function). Is it cool? Yes, sort of, but is it new? No, definitely not. Even Microsoft has something like it (Silverlight). This stuff runs on desktops as well as on mobile phones and believe it or not there is even a oval-shaped, completely new designed phone shown that demonstrates its capabilities. Boy, does this image look familiar. Some guy in a black t-shirt announcing a new oval-shaped gadget. Where have I seen this before? So, at the moment I’m still a bit confused about what to think about this stuff. I’m sure this won’t be the last that will be shown of it at this year’s conference, so I have still some days to refine my opinion.

The afternoon technical general session had some more cool things to show. Take a look at NASA’s World Wind, or project IRIS to see what I mean.

The rest of my day was pretty much EJB 3 related. I attended some tips ‘n tricks and best practices session and got a taste of things to come in EJB 3.1. I will be sharing this information in my J-Spring presentation, June 13^th at the J-Spring conference in Bussum, The Netherlands. So stop by if you have the chance.

At about 7 pm technical sessions ended for today and I went to the Derby BoF/party at Jillian’s. Had some good food and a few beers and talked to some interesting people. Now I’m off to get some sleep and prepare for the second year in a row special Q&A session tomorrow with James Gosling. Boy, what should I ask him this time around? You’ll read about it tomorrow, so stay tuned!

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