Ed Ort

Notes From the 2009 JavaOne Conference

The numbers were a bit down from previous years and perhaps there was a little less buzz, but I found this year's JavaOne Conference to be as interesting and fun as ever. As always, I was part of the Sun Developer Network team that covered the general and technical sessions for the conference web site. I was also host for a number of "Man/Woman on the Street" interviews with conference attendees.

I found the sessions to be uniformly excellent. It seemed that the quality of the presenters and their demonstrations at these sessions was exceptionally high. I hope those of you who went to the conference were equally impressed with the sessions. If you didn't get a chance to attend the conference, you can view video replays of the general sessions.

You can find all of the articles covering the sessions here. I covered the following sessions:

• Intelligent Design -- The Pervasive Java Platform. What drives the evolutionary and revolutionary changes in Java and JavaFX technologies? Ultimately, it's the consumer, says Sun Distinguished Engineer and CTO Bob Brewin.
• Building Cool RIA Enterprise Applications With JavaFX. In this session, JavaFX experts Jim Weaver and Stephen Chin showed how easy it is to build a visually compelling application using JavaFX.
• RESTful Web Services Made Easy. JAX-RS makes it easy to develop RESTful web services using Java technology. This session showed why.

I also had the opportunity to cover the general session for CommunityOne West, a conference focused on communities and open source. CommunityOne West started the day before JavaOne. Cloud computing and a new release of OpenSolaris were the stars of that session. BTW, if you're into cloud computing, there are a lot of good cloud-related sessions that my SDN teammates covered during the JavaOne conference. These include:

• Continuous Integration in the Cloud With Hudson. Sun's Kohsuke Kawaguchi discussed Hudson, the open-source continuous integration system that enables developers to automate various aspects of the development process.
• A New Database for the Cloud. Learn more about the goals of the Drizzle open-source project in building an optimized database.
• Zembly: An Extensible Development Environment in the Cloud, for the Cloud. Sun's Todd Fast and Jiri Kopsa discussed zembly.com, a browser-based development environment that enables programming for web applications and social platforms, as well as web widgets.
• Cloud Computing: Show Me the Money. Panelists from six leading cloud companies talked with Rags Srinivas about the current state of cloud computing.

Also see the new Sun Cloud Developer Tools site.

You can find a great wrap-up of the conference here. As the wrap-up notes, this may be the final JavaOne Conference. I've had the pleasure to attend the last 10 of them. Covering these conferences always required a lot of preparation work and a goodly amount of toil and sweat. But I always found them educational, even exhilarating. They gave me a chance to learn, a chance to share ideas, and a chance to meet some of the most interesting folks on the planet -- the Java community.

Posted at 09:47AM Jun 12, 2009 by edort in article  |  Comments[0]