JavaOne

I went to JavaOne last week and was once again amazed by the number of attendees. I heard someone say 15,000 people had registered. I believe it. Other programming languages like Python and Ruby might be gaining in popularity on Java, but Java is still pretty dominant.

And just like last year, the queues for getting into the sessions were chaos. The people trying to organize the queues were trying hard (well, a few were), but the space where people lined up for the biggest sessions was the least conducive to organization. Someone at Sun needs to go to a major theme park and take lots of notes. Theme parks figured this out long ago.

And then the last thing you want to hear about happening when you were recently in a crowded space with 15,000 of your best friends did happen. On Friday I got an email from Sun that about 70 of those best buddies (actually, almost all of the 70 were workers not included in the registrant head count) caught a highly contagious norovirus.

I shared my pass with some co-workers, so I was there only on Tuesday. Fortunately, none of us got sick. The best sessions I attended were:

• More Effective Java
• Defective Java™ Code: Turning WTF Code into a Learning Experience
• Let’s Resync: What’s New for Concurrency on the Java™ Platform, Standard Edition
• Real World, Not Hello World: GWT Development for Java™ Technology Shops

I was really impressed by the quality of the web apps that had been built with GWT. I co-developed an app at work using GWT, but the part of the UI I developed was not nearly as cool as what these two companies built. It made me want to do some more work with GWT.

While I was impressed with JavaFX Script, the presentation Tuesday morning went at much too slow of a pace. Although 50 minutes had elapsed, I felt like only about 15 minutes of material had been covered.

The EBay presentation was also sort of interesting, but it felt too much like “here’s a little bit of info about a lot of cool technologies we have developed, but it won’t be much use to you since there are a lot of interdependencies and it’s closed source.” In the Q&A session they said they were considering open sourcing some of it, but I would understand if they didn’t. It would probably take a very large amount of work to unwind all the internal dependencies on their other infrastructure.