JavaOne Day One
JavaOne is just so much fun. The days are filled to the brim with fun stuff. It's a programmers paradise. One of the most amazing sites ever is walking into the general session and seeing it filled wall-to-wall with Java Programmers. 10s of thousands of them - it really is quite incredible. I can't imagine how John Gage can appear so relaxed and at ease in front of so many people. I had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with John for a few hours a couple of weeks ago - he seemed no different when on stage than he did sitting in a small room.
One of the hardest things about
JavaOne is that there are just too many different things going on.
It is hard to decide where to go. I do server programming, web
programming and desktop programming - I'm interested in tools, I'm
interested in new language features, I'm interested in scripting
languages. There's just too much to chose from. I had a chat
brief chat with the woman who organizes all of the technical sessions. I
suggested that they release the audio for all of the talks as a series
of podcasts. She thought that was a good idea. That would
keep me busy for a year, listening to all of the various talks. I
hope they do that.
Some of the highlights for the day: the afternoon tech session with demos of World Wind and IRIS. The JavaPosse BOF and Neal Gafter's BOF on Closures. Neal did a good job convincing me that closures would be a good and simplifying addition to the language. I haven't heard any counter arguments yet.
There's a whole lot of buzz around the JavaFX
stuff. I must admit I am a bit skeptical - perhaps the marketing
folks have gotten ahead of themselves a bit. F3 is totally cool
and worthy of a second look, but I'm not sure if it is ready to be
positioned next to Flash/Apollo and Silverlight as the next generation
tool for developing hyper-rich web apps.
In the late afternoon, I gave my Search Inside the Music talk. It was well attended, and was great fun to give. The audience was totally engaged - they chuckled at the right spots, participated in the music similarity poll stayed awake even while I explained what a Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient was. They even interrupted the SITM demo several times with applause - that's never happened before.
At the end of the day we had an unofficial Java Music BOF - a bunch of us who do music and Java went out to dinner. David Kolle (JFugue) and Geertjann (I really did try to learn how to pronounce his name, but it is just not possible for my New England tongue to do so), Matt Warman (he makes a guitar tab program that uses JFugue), and Michael Good (MusicXML) had some spicy Chinese food and good conversations about music and Java.
It is 8AM on Wednesday, time to head over for day 2 - lots of good sessions today too - Project Caroline, Effective Java Reloaded, a GWT talk, extreme gui makeover, F3, darkstar, wonderland, java se media, take 2. It will be a full day. Plus I really want to spend some time in the pavillion - I've only had a few moments to walk through - my biggest surprise there was seeing the Microsoft booth.