JavaOne 2006 - Day 1: Keynotes, pre-enrollment...and Mary

Here we are…JavaOne 2006, day 1…

Opening, as always, by John Gage. Some cliches, like the ‘everybody is a Brazilian’-thing, but catchy.

Off to the real stuff. Some guest appearances on stage; Ed Zander from Motorola and Marc Fleury (JBoss) wearing a red baret (= red hat). Marc announces that JBoss will commit to the NetBeans community. During the day there are lots of plugs for NetBeans and it made me think that NetBeans jumped into the emptyness of having an Open Source Java EE IDE. Eclipse WTP is nice, but has a long way to go. Meanwhile, let’s not underestimate NetBeans. but keep in mind this is a Sun conference and sometimes all is not what is seems…

Then someting very interesting happens…Jonathan Schwartz takes the stage and he introduces Rich Green…Sun’s prodigal son that returned to the company a couple of weeks ago. ‘The question’ that people are rumouring about since Jonathan took over from Scott McNeally is popped…”will Java be open sourced?!?!” Rich answers: “..it’s not a question of whether, but rather a question of how…” say what?! Hmmm…personally, I’m not a big fan of Open Source Java….but with this event I guess it’s finally gonna happen…let’s wait and see….

Some other keynote announcements include the release of Java EE 5. It’s there, so check it out. Another interesting happens as both Sun and Microsoft employees start off on a tango dance. Project Tango is all about Java and .NET WS-* interoperability.

Minutes later, my personal favorite entertainer Charles Beckham takes over the stage. Mr “the demo gods are not with us today” has never managed to have a succesfull demo at any conference I’ve been (JavaOne, JavaPolis, ..) BUT…this time…the demo gods were with him, as he managed to successfully complete a demo. Together with Jeff Jackson these guys are the comical duo at Sun I guess. Funny to watch though.

After the first General Session we experience the new enrollment system. Everyone has to stand inline and have their badges scanned in order to make sure that you’ve enrolled with the hideous ScheduleBuilder. First experience was a good one though. Didn’t have to wait long to get in. First technical session I went to was about project Tango, or WSIT – Java and .NET WS-* interop. Bottomline: “Enterprise Webservices are real” or at least so it seems.

After the first technical session, there was another technical keynote by Sun. They went over the new features of Java SE 6 (Mustang) and of course Java EE 5. Pretty interesting stuff there.

In the afternoon I went to see session about Swing, Open Source SOA initiatives, Service Component Architecture and Portlet 2.0.

The enrollment system fails miserably when you want to see another session in the same room. You have to get out first, then head to the back of the line of people waiting and be in just a little too late for the start of the session. If you’re unlucky the whole procedure takes 15 – 20 minutes. No time to get to a bathroom, let alone to have lunch. Got to buy some energy bars tomorrow…

So all in all a fine first day of the conference, and if you were not able to make it this year, make sure to mark your agenda for next year: 8 – 11 May 2007!

At around 6.30pm the Pavilion welcome party started and guess who I ran into…the one and only “Mary“! Sun’s very own queen of blogging. Got to have a picture taken! She’s very kind!

Paul and I also managed to arrange some special party tickets for a private party held by Parasoft at the W Hotel. We had great fun. I’m a big fan of Parasoft now. They did a good job filling the void of the Borland party 😉

It’s past midnight now…got to get a few hours of sleep. Tomorrow will be another busy day.