Roumen's Weblog

Day Seven - Sessions, Sessions, Sessions (and Sessions)

As the title suggests, being at Java One means seeing lots of sessions. You cannot see everything and in my case it's mostly a fight between tools sessions and web tier sessions. Mostly, tools win for me, I'm visiting many NetBeans and Eclipse talks. I think we're both doing pretty well concerning the presentations, only my NetBeans colleagues are showing more demos. Actually I haven't seen any bigger Eclipse demo yet, which is a pity. I wonder why is that because as a developer I consider slide presentations as less entertaining than real demos, which can also show much more about how good the tools are. On the other hand I have to admit that Eclipse presentation are well prepared. Alltogether it's a good opportunity for me to learn what's new in the Java developer tools space.

The interesting thing is that on this Java One NetBeans and Eclipse are two projects having most of tools sessions. The other tool vendors such as Borland, BEA or Oracle have very few sessions. IntelliJ's IDEA is missing completely. Are the others giving up? Well, it's hard to fight competition which gives development tools away for free, isn't it?

I've enjoyed the NetBeans J2ME demos today, being able to debug your J2ME application inside your mobile phone via bluetooth is kind of cool. Just deploying an app via bluetooth is quite impressive. And the visual editor, well, it doesn't look like Java I know from the older times. I've learned today also a bit more about building applications above NetBeans platform. I have to try the newly introduced wizards in dev builds which help you with lots of the wiring. I have one idea for a little application I could build above the platform to try this out. I'll blog about it once I'll write it.

As I have found out, few more courageous NetBeans guys went to visit the Eclipse booth. Well, they got the T-shirts without having to collect the buttons. That's not fair! I had to walk all around to visit six other booths to get the Eclipse T-shirt! Anyway, so far there were no fights and no bruises, actually we're very friendly to each other. The competition will start again once we come back home. Ian, I am still looking forward to the photo you've said you'd make ;-)

Few photos from today...