The Pavilion

The JavaOne pavilion is THE place to hangout for JavaOne attendees when they are not attending technical sessions. This is the place where all top rockstars – top JUG leaders, Java experts, CEOs, Duke’s Choice Award winners, JavaOne speakers and core developers from Sun are found giving real-time demonstrations of their projects in person and interacting face to face with other java enthusiasts and students. It is THE place to network and interact with industry professionals – with people from over 85 countries. As Chris said during the keynote, you’ll never be able to visit 85 countries in your lifetime so JavaOne is the platform to meet people from so many countries at once, share experiences, learn and collaborate at one single place. This place was filled with more than 50 exhibitor pods of companies working with Java and related technologies. There were fun activities all around the place and lots and lots of goodies and giveaways and T-shirts to bag! It is the place to get all your doubts answered from the people who made the technology themselves! Interesting spots in the Pavilion floor include the OSUM booth, the Change Your World Playground, the Java Utopia, the JavaOne spinning wheel, the Cloud zone, the Sun SPOT booths, the OpenSolaris Install Lounge. There were special 5 minute “Lightning talks” at the Pavilion (a new trend in technical conferences), which are fast-paced and informative BOF sessions for the non-speakers to become speakers for a short while :). There even was a place where you could get yourself a T-shirt with a custom slogan on it and other fun stuff like that! I met a lot of people I always wanted to meet right there on the Pavilion Floor including Geertjan Wielenga (netbeans rockstar!), Eric Reid from ISVe Engineering (him and Scott Mattoon lead the Drupal efforts within Sun), Roger Meike (Director of Operations, Sun Labs!). I was also happy to meet those few I had met last year in India: Arun Gupta (Glassfish evangelist), Vipul Gupta (Sun SPOT team), David Lindt (Sun Learning Services) and couple others. The booths that interested me were those of Intel, the Sun Cloud offerings, Project Kenai, Zemblai, the OpenSolaris SourceJuicer Pod, Netbeans, Amazon, Sun SPOT, LiveScribe, Caucho Quercus, Java RTS, Sun Studio Mixed-Language development, Spring, Atlassian, The Alice Project, Project Speedway (and I’m obviously missing a lot of names as I’m blogging this almost 2 weeks after the conference!).

The JavaOne Pavilion		Java Utopia
Duke’s Choice Winner: Project LincVolt	Java Utopia	JavaFX TV!
JavaFX TV	OSUM Lounge	Play poker and win a porsche!
Geertjan	Me, Geertjan, ND Satcom developer (2009 duke’s choice award winner)
James Gosling’s Pavilion Tour	Arun Gupta (Glassfish Evangelist)	Sun Cloud Zone
Colin Cupp	David Douglas, Sun VP of Cloud Computing giving a tour of the cloud zone	Spinning Wheel Rewards Counter :)

The OSUM booth and Community Corner

The Java.net Community Corner was a meeting point for members of java.net communities, JUGS, Java champions, Netbeans Dream Team as well as our very own OSUM. It also had a podcast booth, book signings and casual Q&A sessions. The Open Source University Meetup Community had a booth setup over at the Community Corner on the JavaOne pavilion floor for the first time this year. It was voluntarily manned by all the campus ambassadors present at JavaOne along with Gary, Tzel, Liana, Colin and Kirby. Our work at the booth was to inform students coming over at the booth about the ever-growing OSUM community, the Campus Ambassador program, interesting opportunities for Students at JavaOne and any other query they may have. Sun had also organized a scavenger hunt just for students at JavaOne, and we collected the stamps from students and also conducted the daily raffles at the OSUM booth itself. We had plenty of giveaways for students coming to the booth – caps, pens, T-Shirts, and most importantly – OSUM badges and bands. We got these cool red T-Shirts which we were supposed to wear while at the OSUM booth - at the back it read "Javaholic. Are you a student? Got questions? Ask me!". Gary was wearing one all the time. We had students from all parts of the world coming over and not just San Francisco. To our surprise, we even had an ex-campus ambassador, Kira with us. It's cool to see how campus ambassadors still hang out together and get to meet like this even after their term is over. Me and Ashwin interviewed Kira for a quick JavaOne minute.

Gary and Kirby	CAs	Liana with Duke

The Student Scavenger Hunt (Dude, Where’s my treasure?)

Sun designed a scavenger hunt just for students, called the "Dude, Where's My Treasure?" student scavenger hunt. On the first three days of JavaOne, June 1 through June 3, students followed a checklist of tasks that led them through the different areas on the conference. To earn stamps on the scavenger hunt card, they had to do specific Java-related activities, and when they filled their cards with stamps, they were entered in raffles to win either an iPod Touch or a Sun SPOT developer kit.  I had captured the raffle and prize distribution for the scavenger hunt on Monday in this JavaOne Minute video.

Winners of the “Dude, Where’s My Treasure” student scavenger hunt

The Spinning Duke Game

This was one place I visited everyday for sure! It’s called the “Spining Duke Game”. All you had to do is to visit the various booths like the Cloud Zone, Kenai booths, the Intel booths or the Zembly booth and interact with the expect / receive their demonstrations- and then get your stamp. After that you come spin the wheel here and win a prize! The more stamps you collect, the better the prize is! There were give levels of prizes including one grand prize per day! I got upto level 2 :)

The OpenSolaris Install Lounge

Abhishek, the guy who has many roles in Sun (former campus ambassador, current campus ambassador coordinator and intern with OpenSolaris marketing team) could almost always be found at the OpenSolaris Install lounge in the middle of the Pavilion, helping students install OpenSolaris on their laptops and engaging them in fun activities. He had also given a talk on the same. There was also an area in the install lounge called the “Rockband 2”, a cool hangout spot for all the rockers at JavaOne – where you could play Rockband 2 on the guitar, live! The third area was the Apps of Steel challenge – where one could checkout the winners of the OpenSolaris Apps of Steel challenge

The Change Your World Playground

The most intersting place on the Pavilion floor was this place! Meet the duke’s choice award winners in person, check out cool high school robotics (JavaOne Minute!), witness all the Sun SPOT goodness or have a seat in Neil Young’s Java-enabled biodiesel and electricity powered LincVolt car (JavaOne minute)! Here I met the director of Sun Labs – Roger Meike and Vipul Gupta, who’s a distinguished engineer working in the Sun SPOT team. He gave us a cool demo of the web-based sensor network monitoring system, which we captured in this JavaOne minute.

Ashwin, Roger Meike, Me, David Lindt		High School Robotics	Java Real Time System Demo