I went to JavaOne last week and was once again amazed by the number of attendees. I heard someone say 15,000 people had registered. I believe it. Other programming languages like Python and Ruby might be gaining in popularity on Java, but Java is still pretty dominant.
And just like last year, the queues for getting into the sessions were chaos. The people trying to organize the queues were trying hard (well, a few were), but the space where people lined up for the biggest sessions was the least conducive to organization. Someone at Sun needs to go to a major theme park and take lots of notes. Theme parks figured this out long ago.
And then the last thing you want to hear about happening when you were recently in a crowded space with 15,000 of your best friends did happen. On Friday I got an email from Sun that about 70 of those best buddies (actually, almost all of the 70 were workers not included in the registrant head count) caught a highly contagious norovirus.
I shared my pass with some co-workers, so I was there only on Tuesday. Fortunately, none of us got sick. The best sessions I attended were:
- More Effective Java
- Defective Java™ Code: Turning WTF Code into a Learning Experience
- Let’s Resync: What’s New for Concurrency on the Java™ Platform, Standard Edition
- Real World, Not Hello World: GWT Development for Java™ Technology Shops
I was really impressed by the quality of the web apps that had been built with GWT. I co-developed an app at work using GWT, but the part of the UI I developed was not nearly as cool as what these two companies built. It made me want to do some more work with GWT.
While I was impressed with JavaFX Script, the presentation Tuesday morning went at much too slow of a pace. Although 50 minutes had elapsed, I felt like only about 15 minutes of material had been covered.
The EBay presentation was also sort of interesting, but it felt too much like “here’s a little bit of info about a lot of cool technologies we have developed, but it won’t be much use to you since there are a lot of interdependencies and it’s closed source.” In the Q&A session they said they were considering open sourcing some of it, but I would understand if they didn’t. It would probably take a very large amount of work to unwind all the internal dependencies on their other infrastructure.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:56 am
A list of real world GWT websites can be found on gwtsite.com. See Who’s using GWT?.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
I gave the eBay presentation and I made the open source comment during the Q&A. We’ve actually done a pretty good job of isolating the interdependencies in what we shared. That’s not what’s keeping it from being open sourced. It’s really more of a process and resources issue, not a technological one. We’re working through the issues one by one. Like I said in the Q&A session after the presentation, we hope to have something better to say about that before Jave One 2009.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Thanks for the comment, Dan. I would be really excited if eBay does open source some of what you guys talked about, because it did sound pretty cool. I attended Chris’s presentation at the MySQL Conference, where he was able to cover some of the stuff eBay has done to improve MySQL, such as the work around substantially scaling up the number of simultaneous connections that can be managed.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:27 am
[...] JavaOne in which they talked about some very interesting patches that had made to MySQL Server. I lamented the fact that they hadn’t open sourced it yet or contributed all the patches back to MySQL. [...]