JavaOne 2006 - Day 3: Busting myths...

Ah well the conference is now also taking its toll upon me when I woke up this morning. But the thoughts of another long and interesting conference day ahead including the Afterdark Bash alleviated some of the scars.

The Mythbusters, who have their own must see popular tv show on the Discovery Channel will be in the Moscone Center tonight. They are a pair of special effect wizards who take on myths and urban legends. Very entertaining and most of the time they blow things up 😉

Before all of the Afterdark fun stuff starts there is tons of sessions that I have to attend. Starting off with the IBM General Session.
Erich Gamma talks about Eclipse and their way of innovation and project planning.

The new enrollment system is getting better every day. They learn. However, if you want to attend a very popular session you have to be on time or the rows will be huge.

I went to a session called ‘Extreme Web Caching’ by Jason Hunter. Great session! Jason is a very entertaining presenter and there was lots of good stuff in it as well.

After the caching stuff I decided to skip a slot in order to walk across the pavilion one more time (as its the final day already) and I called Eric to arrange a meetup. We decided to pick a nearby Starbucks for this mini-blogger meetup, as Eric Stahl is a blogger too. He is Senior Director of Investor Relations at BEA. He joined the company about seven years ago and while he is in the Investor business now, he never lost touch with the technical stuff as he still showed broad knowledge and understanding about most of the topics that are going on in today’s Java world. We exchanged opinions and ideas about several Java related subjects, as well as some sneek peeks behind the curtains of BEA. We also straightened out some of the concerns that I picked up from BEA’s keynote yesterday. Eric explained some more of the intentions of BEA regarding open source and other vendors. Too bad he didn’t do the keynote himself. Unfortunately I had to leave the mini-blogger meeting sooner than I’d liked, but it was session time again and I wouldn’t want to miss that either.

Another very nice session that I attended today was about ‘Secure Coding Anti-patterns’. It showed several nasty little side-effects of some Java constructs that give people with malicious intent the possibility to hack around in your code. Maybe the nicest thing about the presentation was the fact that they didn’t do simple ‘helloworld’ kind of examples, but instead they showed some actual JDK security holes from the (recent) past, that have now all been fixed ofcourse 😉 Very interesting session!

It bugs me everytime I see some people walking in say 5 minutes prior to the end of a session. What are they thinking? My guess is that they are trying to earn there conference fee back by filling in as much eval forms as they can. At the end of every day, 5 lucky people receive a $75 gift certificate. Out of approximately 15.000 people attending, chances are crazy…but hey…

Afternoon sessions were crammed with AJAX, AJAX, and…AJAX. I attended some sessions on using Dojo from Java and ofcourse I went to the ‘AJAX Frameworks Smackdown’, a successor to last years ‘Web Framework Smackdown’. It was fun and entertaining to watch the battle, but the people defending their frameworks were actually too nice to eachother. A lot of smack, but few downs.

That rounded up another day of technical sessions. Off to grab a quick bite now and return in time for the Afterdark Bash. Looking forward to Mythbuster crazyness and the all-female AC/DShe band!