Conferences

JAVA+YOU

Java+You is the theme of JavaOne 2008. No question about it! The feeling I have after day 1 of this year’s JavaOne is that the focus is on the integration with the consumers as well as the developers in all daily-life situations. Rich Green talked a lot about the “Screens of you life” in his keynote today. Whether you read a book, check you bank account statement, chat with friends on you mobile phone or navigate in you car it is all Java… it is the consumer that drives the change…!

This year they even brought Neil Young on the stage to talk about his new interactive blue-ray disc and the way Java technology has enabled him to produce his memorabilia in a format that he feels is what his fans wants – an interactive history of his musical career.

All in all a more or less typical JavaOne day one show. This is my ninth time at JavaOne, so I think I am entitled to say that 🙂

Java+ME

Øredev 2007 – Day 2

Well, I did not win the iPod… But I ended up 5th at the coding challege at the Epsilon booth. Not too bad if you consider the amount of programming expertise present at the conference. The second day of the conference started with an excellent keynote by Joel Spolsky. He talked about what it is that makes some products blue-chip products while other that just as good end up being ordinaray products.

I also heard Andy Hunt talking about how to refactor your wetware, Kevlin Henney talked about the Agility Cube and Jeff Sutherland
presented Project Management with Scrum. The conference ended with a panel debate about the complexity we are facing in modern software development. All in all a great day at the conference.

Øredev 2007 – Day 1

I blogged a short comment every day during JavaOne this summer. These days I am attending the Øredev 2007 Conference and I can not be any less ambitious now, so here we go 🙂

Day 1 opened with a keynote by Andy Hunt that was talking about “How hard can it be?“. It turns out that the answer to this question is that “it is as hard as we make it“.

In one session Rickard Öberg gave a crash course in Qi4j and Context Driven Design. Floyd Marinescu talked about trends and future of enterprise Java™. We got a presentation of JavaFX by Torbjörn Frizon where he coded the presentation viewer on the fly…  Rob Harrop gave an introduction to Spring Batch and Jeff Sutherland talked about The Agile Enterprise.

The afternoon keynote was held by Dan North where he talked about Best Practices or Better “Best” Practices or No Best Practices at all.  He kept his promise to let us out to get our well deserved beer on time 🙂

All in all a great day on the conference that ended with dinner, stand-up comedy and a couple of beers. Tomorrow I plan on winning an iPod in the exhibition hall…!!

JavaOne 2007 Wrap-up

Open Possibilities was the main theme for JavaOne 2007. There is no arguing that with the open-sourcing of Java, the technology is more open than ever. This in turn opens up for more possibilities than ever.

Some of the important things from JavaOne was:
– The completion of the open-sourcing of Java was announced, maybe not too exciting news, but important that it is happening.
– JavaFX, formerly known as F3, was introduced. Sun focuses on winning back the client. There is still a way to go, but only the future will show…
– There is a strong focus on tools with NetBeans and Eclipse as the two major players. Why would anyone pay heaps of money for an IDE when you can get NetBeans or Eclipse for free?

JavaOne 2007 – Day 4

The last day of JavaOne 2007 was no different from the previous days. As always, James Gosling presented an impressive “Toy Show” with everything from Java powered dancing robots and autonomous underwater vehicles and helicopters to monitoring features in NetBeans.

My favorite presentation the last day was Neal Gafter’s presentation of closures in the Java language. It seems that this is something that has to come in one form or the other. Quoting Mark Jason Dominus: ”In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they’ll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion.”

To find out more about closures, look up the following links:
http://www.javac.info/
http://gafter.logspot.com

JavaOne 2007 – Day 3

Today was yet another exciting day at JavaOne. I went to presentations of JPA, Seam, refactoring and Beans Binding. Beans Binding is something that maybe should have been included from the start, but it is great that it is finally coming.

I also went to a presentation of NASA’s World Wind project. This really looks cool! Kind of Google Earth in Swing. I think I will play a little bit around with this when I find the time for it…

The annual reception for Sun Certified Java Professionals was held today. This year I did not win anything at the drawing (as I have done the last two years), but a free beer is still a free beer… 🙂

JavaOne 2007 – Day 2

Day two of the conference was fully packed with excellent presentations. The highlight was Joshua Bloch’s presentation of Effective Java Reloaded. He still has not finished his book, but promised that it will be published at the end of the year. This book, as the previous one, will definitely be a “must-have” for all Java developers. I also went to a presentation of JavaFX to find out more of this. It looks cool, and I will look deeper into it when I am home. It really speeds up the process of creating good-looking rich interfaces….

JavaOne 2007 – Day 1

Open Possibilities is the key word of JavaOne 2007. This is the first JavaOne conference since Sun open sourced its implementation of the Java platform. Besides the everlasting theme of open soucing Java, the keynote of the first day focused a lot on what Java can contribute to the humanity. Scott McNealy was on stage with a representative from the UN to promote the Curriki, a site to help education the world.

JavaFX and JavaFX Mobilewas announced. This is probably the future of Java on the desktop and on mobile devices. Pay attention to this!

For me, the highlight of the day was the sixth version of Java Puzzlers with Joshua Bloch and William Pugh. As always they were tricky, but cool 🙂

JavaOne is great fun, and JavaOne 2007 is no exception…. I look forward to upcoming days!

NetBeans Day 2007

For the fifth time, the NetBeans Software Day was held as a soft start to JavaOne. In the opening keynote, Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green got a question about how they wanted to address the competition from Eclipse. They answered that without Eclipse, NetBeans would not be were it is today, and vice versa. Competition is good and no developer would ever say “I only need one tool….”.

I also attended a presentation of Swing Application Framework, Beans Binding and some other cool stuff upcoming in NetBeans 6.0. If you have not tried out NetBeans yet…try it out!

JavaOne 2007

Back in San Francisco! This year is my eight time at the conference, so it is starting to look like a tradition to me. An addition this year is that the airline company missed to bring my luggage, but it will hopefully come during the day…or so they say…

I am kind of jetlagged now, but I hope I will not promise to much by saying that I hope to be able to post something at least once a day during the conference.