JavaOne 2007 – Days 3/4 it’s a wrap!

So this time a combined blog entry for conference days 3 and 4. Right now I’m thinking about explaining why I did that and come up with some lousy excuses for not filing a separate day 3 report, but the truth is that the conference has really taken it’s toll on me and the hangover from last night isn’t really helpful either. We ended up in a place called The Holy Cow…and holy cow, my head is still spinning 😉

JavaOne day 3 is like the most regular day of the conference. It’s like taking technical session all day long. No real ‘specials’ during the day part. The morning keynote was by Motorola, but I decided to skip that session since I couldn’t take the risk of becoming inspired by the mobility stuff because I simply have no time left on my rainy Sunday afternoons. So you can see it as an act of self protection. For the same reason I have been evading everything Blu-ray related as well. Actually, this isn’t true, but I’m just trying to fool myself here so bear with me. All of that stuff is so incredibly cool that the best and only advice here is to stay far from it 😉

The technical sessions highlights of the day were: NASA’s World Wind project, interoperable SOA with Java EE and .NET, a business panel on Service Component Architecture and a session on Seam by Gavin King who made a cool one man show out of his presentation. Some stand-up comedy on unit testing as well. Maybe this guy should consider a career change?

The evening part of JavaOne day 3 is special. In fact it is so special they actually have a name for it: AfterDark Bash. And yes, there was heavy bashing involved. The evening featured a round of Comedy Central’s BattleBots. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a must since its robot free fighting ‘till death. And kinda deadly it is, so that’s why they have that huge glass plated cage around the arena, because parts were literary coming off. Those bots are on a killing spree!

After BattleBots there was a smashing performance by the Unauthorized Rolling Stones. They played some classic Stones’ songs and they really rock! So AfterDark Bashing continued in the snake pit in front of the main stage…yeah rite…image a snake pit of nerds with oversized JavaOne backpacks slamming into each other. So you should consider the snake pit imaginary.

For me, day 3 and day 4 sort of collided somewhere and I didn’t really experience a transitioning of days. When I sort of woke up I found myself with some colleagues at Lori’s Diner where I made a futile attempt at having some greasy stuff for breakfast. Then off to the General Session. Friday’s General Session is actually the best part of JavaOne. It’s also known as James Gosling’s Toy Show. The two hour session featured 12 cool demonstrations of innovative ways of using Java technology. There was lots of robotics and funny devices involved. Have you ever thought to see a Java operated meat scale? They probably have the video stream of the session up at the JavaOne web site somewhere soon, so check it out if you’re into the geeky stuff. And oh btw, all of the PDFs from the presentations are now available as well.

The remainder of the day until about 5pm is left for attending technical sessions and trying to stuff in as much knowledge as is still possible. For me highlights were a comparison of Ruby on Rails, Grails, and Java EE 5, and a session on the new validation JSR.

And with that, JavaOne 2007 officially ends, but will probably still last for a while in my head as I’m processing all of the ideas and inspiration that I got during the show. Because that’s what JavaOne is all about: inspiration and endless possibilities! Amen!