But I digress... Rick Palkovic's blog

I write to you from a hotel room after experiencing a healthy dose of JavaOne's After Dark bash. The creative chaos featured "SwampThing's" domination of "Angry Asp" in the Battle Bot middleweight competition. Or was it "Sewer Snake" over "Sub Zero?" To tell the truth, my memory is beginning to blur into a virtual mindspace filled with flying Dukes and portal mashups. Finally, a week of intellectual overload was compounded (did I say pounded?) by sensory overstimulation as the Sun Taiko Corps heaped drumming on top of Ajax roundtrips in a wonderland of server-based acronyms.

Let's just say it's been a furious and fascinating 2007 JavaOne. And, if you missed it.... well, you missed it. And, sad to say, even if you were here, you missed a lot. That's because a whole lot is happening at once, and you have to pick and choose which events to attend and which to blow off. To help fill in some of the gaps, I'll be blogging in the coming week, trying to summarize what I witnessed in a few of the technical sessions you may have missed.

Let me point you to a couple of articles already published in JavaOne TODAY. First, there was the "Technical Overview of GlassFish v2," presented by Dhiru Pandey, Senior Staff Engineer at Sun, and Larry White, Architect of High Availability for Sun in Project GlassFish. Larry's comments in particular will be expanded in an upcoming article about clustering and high availability in the GlassFish server. If you missed the review in JavaOne TODAY, you should be able to find it in the online version here. Covered in the same article is Jerome Dochez's session, "GlassFish v3 Architecture Review."

I also reviewed in JavaOne TODAY is the session "Guidelines, Tips, and Tricks for the Java EE 5 Platform". Read the review here.

I dropped in on the session "JavaServer Faces Technology, AJAX, and Portlets: It’s Easy if You Know How!" presented by Brendan Murray, Software Architect at IBM. I didn't know Brendon (hey, I don't get out much), so took a chance. Brendon not only gave us a highly cogent presentation, but also performed a solo lion-taming act while getting a recalcitrant demo to behave before a crowd of savvy developers. We should take a poll of how many planned demos actually worked as expected at JavaOne – I'll bet it wouldn't be more than 50%. How, I wonder, can a local demo work fine, but 20 minutes later fail miserably? Many presenters ask that same question every hour at software presentations around the globe.

Anyway, I'll try to write up a review of Brendon's presentation on the train home from San Francisco. Stay tuned.