Sunday March 04, 2007
Sunday March 04, 2007
JavaOne Proposals: Win Some, Lose Others
Here Tom Ball responds to Chris Adamson's complaint that JavaOne submitters haven't been announcing the success or failure of their proposals.
Well, so, for what it's worth, here's the result of my submissions... on December 7th I announced in this blog (here) that Kai Toedter (from Siemens) and I were preparing a proposal which would discuss the Eclipse RCP and the NetBeans Platform, in some technical detail, fairly and squarely, on the same stage. Quite a lot of responses are found at the end of that blog entry. There was (understandably, in my humble opinion) a lot of interest in this topic. And... that proposal was rejected. I'm really not whining here, because preparing for that presentation was going to be a LOT of work. So, in some ways, not doing that presentation is not a big disappointment. However, I am EXTREMELY surprised that this proposal was rejected. My co-speaker-to-be, Kai Toedter, too. It would've been a really cool presentation, definitely not a "shoot out" and definitely not theoretical. We were going to use Kai's MP3 Manager (built by Kai on both platforms) to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages, the different approaches taken by the different platforms, and the main features provided by both, in the context of Kai's MP3 Manager. And neither of us can be considered novices on the platforms in question, so on that basis we could not have been rejected either.
Further evidence that I'm not simply whining is... the fact that one of my other proposals was accepted! So, by not doing the Eclipse/NetBeans talk, I am not missing out on JavaOne, because I'll be doing a technical session with Dave Koelle, the writer of the JFugue API, which vastly simplifies MIDI programming. We're working on our presentation as I type, albeit in different continents and we've never met each other before. So, it'll be pretty cool on many levels. He'll be talking about the API itself, then I'll talk about the open sourced music notepad built on top of the JFugue API, and then Dave will talk some more about general API usability issues. At least, that's how we're envisioning it now. I'm really looking forward to it.
In addition, I submitted a BOF with Chuk Munn Lee, on some do's and don'ts for NetBeans module development. That was turned down and so was my BOF on framework support. Both of these I can understand being rejected, as there could be more general high-level topics worth discussing. But the rejection of the Eclipse/NetBeans talk genuinely doesn't make sense to me. Clearly, it was not going to be a "vendor specific" talk, because BOTH the two major platforms in rich-client platform land were going to be discussed. There were no plans whatsoever for us to start tootling our own horns or praising either platform for any other than technically-sound reasons. I can only imagine that rich-client platforms aren't the "in thing" at the upcoming JavaOne. However, it was submitted to the "desktop" track. Aren't rich-client platforms an integral part of the desktop landscape and aren't people continually wondering which of the two major RCPs to adopt and don't people want a practical technical session explaining the pros and cons of the two and see in real life the things worth considering?
I remain, puzzled in Prague. Or, in fact, Goa, right now. So, I am puzzled in Panaji (a.k.a. Panjim, capital of Goa, with an amazing whitewashed Portuguese church in the main town square), although I'm temporarily living in Baga, which is a beach spot in Goa. So, about this NetBeans/Eclipse thing, I'm basically baffled in Baga...
Mar 04 2007, 01:10:39 AM PST Permalink
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