Wednesday May 16, 2007
Wednesday May 16, 2007 I'm back from JavaOne where I had a pretty good time. The weather started out real nice Mon. and Tues. but by Fri. it was really cold. I need to bring a heavier jacket next time as I managed to get myself a cold. I'm sure that some of those people on the plane with me have it now. :-(
This was the 3rd time I've been to JavaOne. I wasn't listed as a speaker this time so I was sentenced to the standby (aka Sun employees) line for the sessions. I need to come up with something to talk about next year. I was even demoted out of being an alumni. :-)
As usual I attended some good talks and some not so good ones. By far my favorite talk was A Lock-Free HashTable by Cliff Click. It wasn't really java specific but it was clever and Cliff is a good speaker.
My next most favorite talk was a surprise to me. It was Chris Oliver's JavaFX Script talk. I'm mostly allergic to hype and JavaFX was getting a lot of talk. I had read his F3 blog somewhat but not really that closely. I mostly went because it was the only thing I found interesting in that time slot. It was really cool. I was very impressed it is very simple for a programmer to produce very nice looking gui instead of the typical looking Swing/AWT stuff. Of course the real must have is a tool that allows building this kind of interaction without really having to think about the programming language. Still he had some very sweet demos.
Another good talk was the Garbage-Collection-Friendly Programming by three members of the Hotspot JVM team (not that I'm biased or anything). I didn't really learn much mostly because I hang around with these guys (electonically) quite a bit, but the talk had a lot of good stuff and was entertaining. They packed Gateway 102/103 and had questions until they threw us out of the room.
The Hotspot BOF was the same night as the GC talk and I think that the people that didn't get their questions answered in the afternoon session came by for a second chance at night as most of the questions were GC related with very few runtime or compiler questions. The BOF was also in Gateway 102/103 which was a terrible room for a BOF. The room holds like 1500 people and we might have had 50. As a result there was a lot of echo and it was really very hard to hear the questions. I don't know how hard it was to hear the answers hopefully not as hard as the questions.
The final cool thing was that I had several people come up to me and read my badge and go "oh you're fatcatair!". So I guess I really have some amount of audience paying attention.