JavaOne 2005: Day 2 - Dukes and BOFs...

Tuesday morning’s General Session was really popular. There were once again huge rows of people waiting for the doors to open, just like on Monday. Being a Conference Alumni gives you the advantage of joining the Alumni row which is way shorter and lets you get in before the ‘regulars’. Alex joined the Sun CIOs for breakfast so I took my opportunity to mingle with the alumni elite ;o)

The audience was told that Sun was keeping track of people attending BOFs and Sessions, so that they could come up with a top ten list. The three most popular ones were about JBI, Programming puzzlers and EJB 3.0. From my own experience EJB 3.0 belonged there because it was really hard to get in. The room was really packed.

Another interesting thing to (literaly) watch is the gigantic screen that forms the backdrop of the General Session stage. It’s dimensions are huge: about 25 meters long and 6,5 meters high! They created this massive display by blending four projected images together. The background graphics are 5000 pixel JPGs. Two HD servers playing back in sync with a resolution of 1050 x 5000 pixels! I’ve put it on the wishlist for my new living room, but I don’t think my wife will really like it ;o)

As you may have noticed from other sources already, Eclipse 3.1 was officially released yesterday. Check it out at their website.

Another interesting announcement that was made is that BEA Systems is offering official support for both Spring and Struts frameworks running on top of WebLogic Server. They also came up with a partnership agreement with Interface21, the company behind Spring.

Oracle announced that it’s JDeveloper J2EE development tool will be available for free and that they have partnered with the Apache MyFaces project.

Interesting news form the main stage as Scott McNealy took the stage. I told Alex, who had joined me after a dull breakfast with the CIOs, that I found Scott to look very tired. Seconds later Scott told the audience that he has had little to no sleep the past night because Sun and SeeBeyond had been working on an acquisition that night.  They officially announced that Sun will take over SeeBeyond in the coming months for a mere $387M.

Then there was a long and rather dull talk about the US Healthcare and Education systems and how the US could learn from the Open Source Healthcare project running on Java in Brasil. Right after that came the Duke Awards. The ‘Java Oscars’, so to speak. It didn’t really surprise me that almost all dukies went to education and healthcare related projects. The only really cool project that scored an award was Boeing. Boeing has been succesfully experimenting with real-time Java in order to fly their planes unmanned, with Java as the pilot. The final Duke Award was a very special one. It was a lifetime award for James Gosling because of his achievements with Java. As a tribute, they played a special video that was really cool.

Actually the Duke awards were a bit rushed, because the General Session was running late because of all the SeeBeyond fuss. Too bad, because now there were lots of people leaving the room already while another good part still had to come: some good old Java t-shirt tossing ;o) Well….less people in the room means more chances for me and indeed I got one!

Finally, the General Session ended and it was off to the Technical Sessions…I went to sessions about SOA, Web Services, Profiling and EJB 3.0 persistence.

Most important session of the day was ofcourse the famous ‘Borland BOF’. This time BOF meaning Beer and Babes of a Feather ;o) For those of you who have been at JavaOne before you know not to miss this party. And…it was a fabulous party!…ehhh I mean BOF. Respect to Borland’s CEO, who really lives a rock and roll lifestyle! It almost tempted me to use Borland products from now on…but nah…. ;o) They also had a raffle where you could win a Ferrari Go-Cart, but unfortunately I didn’t win it, although it was close…just a single number difference.

Now just a few hours of sleep and off we go to day 3…interoperability day!

I will be posting pictures and other stuff later on, in a special JavaOne Aftermath post.