Apparently, the only hotel with a vacancy this week wasn't in the PDC bus loop. Good thing Winston rented a car and let me use it. His hotel was just a mile away which was really convenient as my Sun booth duty at PDC was in the morning. We underestimated the response to Sun PDC t-shirt and discovered that we were out. All day 2, attendees stopped by our booth just for a shirt ! It wasn't nearly as crazy as Tues night and to my surprise we were getting
questions about Interoperability with .NET . It was vaguely understood that Sun provides Web Services support, but there was some leeriness since large amounts of data travelling across the wire is slow.
Some interesting folks stopped by today. One problem to solve, which became a common theme - disparate systems, was to replace an OS/2 com library with a Java library which also talks to an ATM, DB2 and .NET. Another guy was a PhD student at Cambridge studying robotics, who is also doing his internship at Microsoft. He was really anxious to get a Sun PDC shirt and probably got the last one. He couldn't wait to wear his new Sun PDC shirt to class.
Another guy, who may have been from Finland was such a character, high pitched, non-irritating whining, smiling wearing a baseball cap. He was a Java guy happy with the open sharing at Sun vs. his experience in using other products.
Another was bewildered that Sun doesn't have a laptop yet. Actually we do now, and I found the Ultra 3 page on sun.com and he was nearly ecstatic.
Practically all others who stopped by were interested in Sun's interoperability story and how Java works with .NET. I briefly introduced the Web Services Enhancement specification , jointly worked on by Sun and Microsoft. Still, many weren't convinced that this is all they need, J2EE/JAX-RPC, because they found that Web Services are slow.
So, as a extreme newbie to Interoperability, I went to Microsoft to ask some questions. I received a good overview of Indigo, but no .NET/Java interop via binary XML . So, the Indigo guy introduced me to a Product Manager at Microsoft. We chatted and exchanged business cards. He agreed to send me some information and also mentioned a company doing some Java interoperability, Intrinsyc.
Also, my booth buddies introduced me to Fast Infoset which is a specification for binary XML. This spec isn't well know, apparently since IBM, HP and Google haven't yet contributed. The PM indicated that Microsoft probably wouldn't be interested until these companies expressed interest in contributing.
After booth duty, I attended the Microsoft party at Universal Studios, which was pretty cool. Believe it or not, I had never seen a 3D movie and last night saw 2. I highly recommend seeing the Governator, uh, Terminator. Make sure to ride the Harley just outside the show. That was awesome, well not quite, it's just a prop, can't start and won't go very far. What was awesome was when suddenly a couple of guys suddenly shouted, "Hey, you're from Sun" and wanted to have their photo taken with us. And when we took the escalator, PDCers were taking our photo (really paid off to wear shirts with Sun logos) I felt like an instant celebrity!
Some interesting folks stopped by today. One problem to solve, which became a common theme - disparate systems, was to replace an OS/2 com library with a Java library which also talks to an ATM, DB2 and .NET. Another guy was a PhD student at Cambridge studying robotics, who is also doing his internship at Microsoft. He was really anxious to get a Sun PDC shirt and probably got the last one. He couldn't wait to wear his new Sun PDC shirt to class.
Another guy, who may have been from Finland was such a character, high pitched, non-irritating whining, smiling wearing a baseball cap. He was a Java guy happy with the open sharing at Sun vs. his experience in using other products.
Another was bewildered that Sun doesn't have a laptop yet. Actually we do now, and I found the Ultra 3 page on sun.com and he was nearly ecstatic.
Practically all others who stopped by were interested in Sun's interoperability story and how Java works with .NET. I briefly introduced the Web Services Enhancement specification , jointly worked on by Sun and Microsoft. Still, many weren't convinced that this is all they need, J2EE/JAX-RPC, because they found that Web Services are slow.
So, as a extreme newbie to Interoperability, I went to Microsoft to ask some questions. I received a good overview of Indigo, but no .NET/Java interop via binary XML . So, the Indigo guy introduced me to a Product Manager at Microsoft. We chatted and exchanged business cards. He agreed to send me some information and also mentioned a company doing some Java interoperability, Intrinsyc.
Also, my booth buddies introduced me to Fast Infoset which is a specification for binary XML. This spec isn't well know, apparently since IBM, HP and Google haven't yet contributed. The PM indicated that Microsoft probably wouldn't be interested until these companies expressed interest in contributing.
After booth duty, I attended the Microsoft party at Universal Studios, which was pretty cool. Believe it or not, I had never seen a 3D movie and last night saw 2. I highly recommend seeing the Governator, uh, Terminator. Make sure to ride the Harley just outside the show. That was awesome, well not quite, it's just a prop, can't start and won't go very far. What was awesome was when suddenly a couple of guys suddenly shouted, "Hey, you're from Sun" and wanted to have their photo taken with us. And when we took the escalator, PDCers were taking our photo (really paid off to wear shirts with Sun logos) I felt like an instant celebrity!
