Castellers

I've gone to many JavaOne conferences at the Moscone Center but today was my first experience of a Oracle OpenWorld. I was very curious and I found the experience very interesting. Although the two conferences are in the same physical space, the two experiences are very different.

I only have an "exhibitor" pass, so I've not been able to attend any of the technical sessions but, with those caveats, below are some observations; feel free to add additional observations as comments to this entry. Also check my Flickr set.

• OOW is significantly larger in attendance. I've heard about 40K-45K; J1 was, at its peak, 20-25K (afair).
• OOW uses not just Moscone North and South, but also West, and they close Howard street.
• The tent is an integral part of the event, used for lunches, drinks and as a lounge.
• The dress code at OOW are suits... and very few body piercings :-)
• Most attendees at OOW seem to use (smart)phones to stay connected (to their admin assistants?).
• The (internet cafe-like) area with stations to check email / browse at OOW is much smaller than at J1
• The expo and keynote areas are reversed between Moscone South and North.
• The Expo at OOW is very busy, with all the big names in SIs, hardware, software, etc.
• No more bean bags at the bottom of the stairs.
• The developer track is 6 blocks away, at the San Francisco Hilton.

Really, the two conferences can't be more different. Also check out some pictures I took.

A, not as quick as intended, post with my whereabouts and some highlights for next week:

Unconference -
Sunday afternoon, 1pm-7pm I'll be participating in our Unconference, where Alexis plays MC. The Unconference is a very low key event and should be a lot of fun; register and join us... then we transfer to The Thirsty Bear for food, drinks and conversation from 7pm till 10pm.

CommunityOne -
Monday is the beginning of CommunityOne and I'll be there the whole day. The keynote is by Dave and John on Cloud and OpenSolaris; don't miss it as it will include several announcements, including the formal launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Monday is also my only formal presentation this year (yeah! that means I get to enjoy the rest of the show): I will be talking about Sun's GlassFish Portfolio in S307894 (10:50am, Hall E 135 ). I chose to make the presentation a mix of Community status and Product overview because I think that synergy is what drives GlassFish. I will cover the adoption indicators for GlassFish and show evidence of its growth; I then talk about the projects and products in Sun GlassFish Portfolio explaining the value of moving from user to customer. I then do a very quick pass over the status of all the different projects. I will also include a couple of pre-announcements and clues of events later in the week.

The rest of Monday is full of sessions, many of them about OpenSolaris and Cloud. Two sessions I'm personally interested are Guido's S307145 on Python 3000 retrospective and Frank's S307160 Jython and Django. The day ends with the OpenSolaris party, which is the main party this year.

JavaOne -
JavaOne is as always, very busy and very good, and GlassFish, family and friends is very well represented. Below I'll just highlight a handful of events; for additional links, check Arun's series of short videoblogs (great idea although I am not there because we could not align our schedules), and his list of sessions plus my Additional Links.

Each day has its own keynote and all of them seem worth attending; not just for what they say but how they say it, specially after the oracle announcement. Of course, Tuesday morning's Sun keynote is a must attend, with Jonathan and "a special guest or two", so get there early. The afternoon technical keynote with Bob includes several demos from our team, so don't miss those either! The rest of the Tuesday is full of sessions and BOFs; as usual it is very hard to choose which ones to attend, so I'll just highlight Jerome's TS-4923, with an great technical overview of GFv3.

Wednesday starts with the Ericsson's keynote in the morning; Ericsson is our main partner with SailFin and we share the same vision of converged SIP/HTTP applications. The afternoon keynote is Eric on JavaFX and its a good time to see how that story looks like now. My highlights are for Kohsuke's TS-5301 (Hudson in the Cloud and the Swarm) and BOF-5105 (Hudson Community), Jacob and Vivek's TS-4921 (Scripting on GlassFish). Wednesday also has a Roberto and Bill's BOF-4483 on JavaEE 6, and a Java EE 6 sneak peek event - drop by the GlassFish pod to get an invite.

Thursday has the (first ever!) keynote by Microsoft on Software + Services: The Next Application Platform, and the afternoon is by IBM on Extreme Transaction Processing and Elasticity. My GF highlight for that day would be the BOF-1721 (meet the GF team), we will all be there - and I believe there will be handouts there.

Friday has James' traditional toy show; always very entertaining (for geeks!). And Ludo lucks out with one of the last but certainly not least! sessions TS-5055 (Eclipse and GlassFish).

Hope to see many of you next week!

A final screencast before JavaOne 2006. I've done a Commentary on J1 Events Related to the GlassFish Community. The commentary runs for 10 minutes but hopefully you will find it useful.