CommunityOne I was at CommunityOne
and JavaOne
all of last week. In this blog entry, I will attempt to capture the
highlights from the various sessions, panels and demos that I attended.
I expect that my report will spill over to more than one entry - to
make it more readable.
Overall, the energy level of the conference was quite high - with 4000+
attendees at CommunityOne and 15,000+ attendees at JavaOne. There was a
huge focus on mobility/Java everywhere/Java+You and the fact that the
Java Platform is now being used by 200+ languages!
The CommunityOne event (on May 5th) opened with a keynote by Ian
Murdock. Ian emphasized the role of communities to shape the computer
industry. He also talked about the fundamental economic model in
OpenSource. This was followed by a panel on "A Multitude of Models. How
Communities Work". The panel was moderated by Matt Asay (Alfresco)
and had a lot of community luminaries - including Marten Mickos (MySQL),
Ted Leung (Python), Mike Evans (Red
Hat), Jeremy Allison (Samba), Jim
Zemlin (Linux
Foundation) and Stormy Peters (OpenLogic).
They addressed questions on a wide range of topics - from
"Who
makes up these communities?" to "Satisfying the tension between the
needs of contributors to the needs of businesses".
Rich Green came up on stage next and launched OpenSolaris.
This is completely revamped with a new logo (which can be seen on the
picture to the right) and a much better OOTB experience. In fact,
Stephen Hahn showed how easy and fast it is to install from the CD that
was distributed to all attendees (you can download the ISO image here).
Next, Jim Hughes
and Jeff Bonwick
demoed the ZFS data recovery feature. Jim used a
sledgehammer to destroy a hard drive that was running and connected to
the machine and Jeff used a power drill to drill a hole through another
hard drive. ZFS quickly recovered the data from a backup onto
a new
pair of drives - live and onstage!
Later, I attended a session that showed a bunch of
demos. There were a series of short presentations on various
subjects by
various speakers. The presenters quickly created demo applications and
ran them, all the while explaining the
language and / or environment. The JavaFX demo by Josh Marinacci
was quite cool. Matt Quail provided
some humor when he talked about, "You suck at WebApps".
The final session I attended at CommunityOne was by James Gosling in
the NetBeans track. He invited a series of partners and NetBeans
Community members to talk about their experience with NetBeans. Adam
Myatt spoke about his latest NetBeans book Pro
NetBeans 6. Dr. B.V. Kumar talked about the beginnings of
NetBeans usage at Cognizant. Kumar
also mentioned the SOA
book that he co-authored with Tony
Ng and me. This book should be available later this year.
Wednesday May 14, 2008
