This is an attempt to sum up my experiences from JavaOne. A lot of information went into my brain during the first week of June 2009 but for some reason it doesn't easily come out. I have spent some time to review the session schedule and my notes taken to pull out the knowledge stuffed in there, because it is a lot of knowledge stuffing going on in a week like that. Let's start from the beginning.
I arrived on Saturday evening to have Sunday and Monday to get in shape. With 9 hours time difference you have quite some adjustment to do to get in phase with the clock. Trying to watch a musical (Spamalot) on Sunday evening might not be the smartest thing to do if you want to get value for your money since the jet lag plays tricks with you.
The JavaOne conference started on Tuesday but there was another event overlapping the main event called CommunityOne. This is a freebie where the Monday was technical sessions like JavaOne and the following two days were more hands on sessions. Maybe it is kind of a dress rehearsal for the real thing. I found Community one to be a good warm up for the main event. They even had a better band at the cloud computing party, in my opinion, the Spazmatics only playing hits from the 80's.
Also the pavilion opened on Monday, which is kind of a trade show with a lot of interesting booths. From a JavaOne alumni I heard that the pavilion was considerably smaller that previous years which also was the case for the whole conference. The economic crisis takes its toll on this event too and maybe the pig flu also has some effect on the number of participants.
The week continued with one or two general sessions a day which was mostly a way for the sponsors of the conference to show off. I agree that an OSGi based modular JDK like Apache Harmony is a cool thing but it isn't really that spectacular on stage, really. I didn't really think that the announcements this year was that spectacular. JDK 7... milestone 3. JavaFX 1.2... beta. Java EE 6... also a milestone. The Java Store... also beta, only for US. But you always had the excitement of the T-shirt launching at the general sessions where some contained a gift certificate for an Amazon Kindle or a JavaFX phone or something.
At one of the sessions a T-shirt came flying straight at me and suddenly I saw a forest of hands above me and I knew it was lost. When I looked at people to the left of me I saw they were searching for something and I realized that the t-shirt was still at large so I looked down and saw something under the chair in front of me so I reached down and there it was. Talk about poetic justice. Well it was only a long sleved t-shirt that could have been a size or two bigger, like me, but it was nice to actually win something.
When not doing general sessions there were a lot of interesting technical sessions which they of course scheduled simultaneously. The quality of the speakers varied a lot. You think that the big names making presentations would be good at it, but don't be fooled by their names. Some of the better presenters I saw was Joshua Bloch, Romain Guy, Chet Haase and Sweden's own Jonas Bonér. I actually saw Jonas presention twice, the second time some weeks later at Javaforum and this time in Swedish. You can learn a lot about holding presentations by attending such a conference, at least I did.
On Thursday the pavilion closed and it felt kind of like the count down started. I was feeling quite full from all information stuffed in my brain already. Of course I went to the After Dark Bash which is the official party for the conference but I left early to see what you can do with Java, some home brewed electronics and a Wiimote. Check out James Gosling's Toy Show to see some of the fun you can have if you have the right working place. Let's see if Larry Ellison likes it too.
On Friday I hit the low water mark in presentations, no names to protect the innocent, and the last presentation went by. The feeling that the conference was coming to an end I already had the day before but now it was a fact. I had a very nice dinner with my colleagues in a restaurant in The Castro called Catch. That was really a perfect end for this intense week in San Francisco and if I get a chance to go there again, I will not hesitate to do it.
I arrived on Saturday evening to have Sunday and Monday to get in shape. With 9 hours time difference you have quite some adjustment to do to get in phase with the clock. Trying to watch a musical (Spamalot) on Sunday evening might not be the smartest thing to do if you want to get value for your money since the jet lag plays tricks with you.
The JavaOne conference started on Tuesday but there was another event overlapping the main event called CommunityOne. This is a freebie where the Monday was technical sessions like JavaOne and the following two days were more hands on sessions. Maybe it is kind of a dress rehearsal for the real thing. I found Community one to be a good warm up for the main event. They even had a better band at the cloud computing party, in my opinion, the Spazmatics only playing hits from the 80's.
Also the pavilion opened on Monday, which is kind of a trade show with a lot of interesting booths. From a JavaOne alumni I heard that the pavilion was considerably smaller that previous years which also was the case for the whole conference. The economic crisis takes its toll on this event too and maybe the pig flu also has some effect on the number of participants.
The week continued with one or two general sessions a day which was mostly a way for the sponsors of the conference to show off. I agree that an OSGi based modular JDK like Apache Harmony is a cool thing but it isn't really that spectacular on stage, really. I didn't really think that the announcements this year was that spectacular. JDK 7... milestone 3. JavaFX 1.2... beta. Java EE 6... also a milestone. The Java Store... also beta, only for US. But you always had the excitement of the T-shirt launching at the general sessions where some contained a gift certificate for an Amazon Kindle or a JavaFX phone or something.
At one of the sessions a T-shirt came flying straight at me and suddenly I saw a forest of hands above me and I knew it was lost. When I looked at people to the left of me I saw they were searching for something and I realized that the t-shirt was still at large so I looked down and saw something under the chair in front of me so I reached down and there it was. Talk about poetic justice. Well it was only a long sleved t-shirt that could have been a size or two bigger, like me, but it was nice to actually win something.
When not doing general sessions there were a lot of interesting technical sessions which they of course scheduled simultaneously. The quality of the speakers varied a lot. You think that the big names making presentations would be good at it, but don't be fooled by their names. Some of the better presenters I saw was Joshua Bloch, Romain Guy, Chet Haase and Sweden's own Jonas Bonér. I actually saw Jonas presention twice, the second time some weeks later at Javaforum and this time in Swedish. You can learn a lot about holding presentations by attending such a conference, at least I did.
On Thursday the pavilion closed and it felt kind of like the count down started. I was feeling quite full from all information stuffed in my brain already. Of course I went to the After Dark Bash which is the official party for the conference but I left early to see what you can do with Java, some home brewed electronics and a Wiimote. Check out James Gosling's Toy Show to see some of the fun you can have if you have the right working place. Let's see if Larry Ellison likes it too.
On Friday I hit the low water mark in presentations, no names to protect the innocent, and the last presentation went by. The feeling that the conference was coming to an end I already had the day before but now it was a fact. I had a very nice dinner with my colleagues in a restaurant in The Castro called Catch. That was really a perfect end for this intense week in San Francisco and if I get a chance to go there again, I will not hesitate to do it.
