Travels with FatCatAir

Wednesday May 31, 2006

JavaOne rev. 2

So I went to JavaOne for the second time. Last year was my first trip and I was much better about blogging about it. This year I was pretty slack about it. Probably mostly because I didn't get to go to many sessions. Last year I was a "pretend" speaker but this year I was actually speaking. I was part of a session where three of us from the (jit) compiler group talked about new compiler optimizations in the Hotspot JVM. So I got my literal 15 minutes of fame.

It was actually more fame than I expected since I was anticipating we were going to get assigned a small room of to the side somewhere. I was pretty surprised when we got Gateway 102/103 which I think except for the General Sesssions is the biggest room in the place. Someone like Josh Bloch can fill the place (and overflow) we only managed to get it maybe 1/3 full. I thought it went well but we'll see what the audience thought when we get access to the results of the evaluations.

I got to talk a little bit about tiered compilation and where we stand on it. I alos volunteered that if people were brave they could download mustang source and build a tiered system and try it. No one took me up on it but coming up afterward and asking how to do it. So either no one is that brave or maybe they were just being sensible?

I spent a good bit of time at the SunSPOT booth doing 3 shifts of demos and such. It was really sort of funny. Months ago when the call went out for booth duty sign up when I went to look for a spot all of the times for booths that were related to my job were already taken. So I looked for something interesting to do. I had blogged about SunSPOT before so I figured I'd sign up so I could learn more about it and maybe make of with one. :-)

A week before JavaOne I got an email from Roger Meike who is the director in Sun Labs that is doing this work asking who I was and why did I sign up for booth duty on his project. I explained the situation and as luck would have it another person in his group used to work here in Cary and he vouched for me. So I got a little training on it before JavaOne and by the end of my shifts I was almost an expert. They are really cool I wish I had the time (and money) to actually put some to use but I see my plane building as likely to soak up most of my free time.




May 31 2006, 05:13:40 PM EDT Permalink