JavaOne 2007 – Day 2 Half way

As I’m just returning from the JUG leaders BoF session and the hour is late, I will probably keep this entry short.

Day 2 of the conference was another interesting day. The morning keynote was presented by Oracle and they did a good job at making it a show. They had two announcements. One is the additional open sourcing of a new set of rich internet components and the other being Oracle’s application server is officially certified for Java EE 5. Apart from that no real exciting stuff here. Just a lot of demo’s focusing on the richness of user interfaces and the user experience as a whole. A lot of clicking around, but no real message underneath.

After the keynote it was off to a very special event for NLJUG members. A specially arranged Q&A session with James Gosling. The obvious first question to be popped was about JavaFX. James told us he is very excited about this specific piece of technology and that we had only seen a glimpse of it yet. JavaFX is currently only in prototype stage and a lot of hard work was needed to get it ready just in time for the show. A full blown version of it is to be expected within a year or so, probably released during next year’s JavaOne. Apart from the JavaFX stuff there were questions about backwards compatibility, the rise of scripting languages versus a statically typed language, about Apple and the iphone, and then a whole bunch of other questions. I asked James about the new Java Realtime 2.0 that was announced during yesterday’s keynote and why an enterprise developer should care about it. James mentioned the NASDAQ case where on average about 150.000 transactions per second take place. This was the perfect example of an enterprise realtime system and also the perfect illustration of a system you cannot do with things like Ruby and Rails. Afterwards we took some group pictures that will be up on the NLJUG site any time soon and some t-shirt signing as well. James told us that he would sign everything except for blank cheques 😉

Back at the regular program I attended some sessions on the new ideas for Java Persistence API 2.0, Enterprise interoperability in SOA environments, and about the OpenAjax Alliance. At around 17.30h Intel’s general session kicked off and they told us how they rock Java. The session was about giving developers a glimpse of the participation Intel does on all sorts of Java related projects, like JVM porting and optimizing applications running on particular hardware for performance. Somehow informative but a little bit boring as well.

After the afternoon general session it was party time again. Together with my coworkers and some other people we attended the JBoss, IBM and Eclipse parties, all conveniently located next to each other in the Metreon building right next to the conference venue. At around ten o’clock I left the party for the JUG leaders session. I met some interesting people there and got the opportunity to introduce myself as the co-lead for the NLJUG. Afterwards we took a picture with all of the JUG leaders present on the stairs in the main hallway.

It’s been a long day and I’m pretty much tired right now. The conference is already halfway and still there is so much to see and learn. Time flies…