Gero Vermaas on...

JavaOne 2007 is history for almost a week already and finally I found a little time to post a few of the highlights. I arrived on Sunday and Sunday evening Klaas Jan of the NLJUG (like very year) organized a nice diner for all NLJUG member. This year famous blogger MaryMary also joined. Monday was mostly spend together with Andreas to prepare our BoF session. We had worked on the slideset over the phone, but this was the first time we ran through it face to face and that definitely helped us to make it a bit more smooth and cut some slides to meet the time restrictions. When we registered in the speaker room I finally appreciated the fact that JavaOne attendees had to register themselves for session they wanted to attend. Why,... well now the organization could tell us how many people we could expect: 130+! Most likeliky not all 130 would show up, but it was a bit more than we expected and therefore we decided to cut the 'interactive' parts from the slides. With so many attendees that would get out of control (time wise).

Tuesday started of with the key note. As usual a slick and good produced session with JavaFX (Mobile), RealTime Java 2.0 and the milestone of achieving full open source of Java SE as the highlights. The actual mail notifying the world that Java SE was not fully available as open source was typed in during the key note... never try to type serious text in a demo... it was proven again that this is hard to do.

After a nice Mexican diner Andreas and I prepared for our BoF. We had the best timeslot possible, the first BoF on the first day of JavaOne when everybody still fresh and eager to attend evening sessions. We had a good audience (~80) and the session went pretty smooth. On my employers blog I posted an entry regarding the first part of the session: Order Management and SOA. In a few sentences:

Order Management is a process that is used in all industries and the Order Management API (JSR 264) is an API that can be used in all these industries. It is defined such that it fits perfect in an SOA and many of the concepts that apply to SOA are applied or supported by the Order Management API. This API can help you to reduce you integration costs.

Apart from the content of the session JavaOne is always a good place to meet old colleagues and make new friends. When they mention your session in their blog, it gets even better. By the way, Andreas really proved that he practiced, one of his slides had some example XML code and included a date/time: Tue, May 8th, 2007 20:18:00. This was intended to be the moment when the slide should be presented, guess what? Right on time, pretty impressive. Even more impressive was the fact that someone in the audience noticed this, well done Vincent, you were really paying attention ;-)

Unfortunately I missed the JavaPosse BoF session, it was scheduled after our BoF and we decided that we deserved a beer... and after hearing the podcast I regret that even more. Next year I'll definitely attend it.

Wednesday, Thursday I attended sessions on Ruby which convinced me that I should start playing with it. Especially with the good tool support like in NetBeans. Tor Norbye (The 'Demo Stud' as James Gossling announced him on Fridays keynote) showed of the cool features of NetBeans in a technical session and during Fridays keynote. Back home I immediately installed NetBeans 6M9 and it indeed works really smooth. Code completion is smarter, color coding is much smarter (for example variable names of unused of mistyped variables appear light grey or italic. Immediately notificying you that something is wrong.) You should really give it a try.

The session on BluRay, OCAP (Open Cable Application Platform), RealTime Java were interesting to get a feel for what going on in these areas. Not my speciality, but that's the good part of conferences like JavaOne: you can get a taste of all kinds of technology that you do not run into during day-to-day business.

Now I need to get ready for the next conference, Telemanagement World in Nice.