JavaOne final thoughts and leaving on a jetplane
Wow, it's been an intense week and I can't believe that another JavaOne conference is over. The wireless network over at Moscone was turned off so I've come back to my hotel to spot-blog from their lobby. I really must remember to unsubscribe from the wireless provider when I get home. I'm not sure the hotspot will reach England!
For me, one of the best parts of JavaOne is meeting people and this year has been no exception. It's always great to put faces to names, particularly when our industry is so focussed on electronic communication. So then, what did I think of the conference? Overall I've had a great time. Of course, there have been some crappy sessions but thankfully the number of good sessions vs. the number of bad is much, much higher. I decided early in the conference to skip anything J2EE related and I'm really glad that I did. Okay, so I did slip with the JavaServer Faces session but that was new, and the scalable vector graphics is actually what attracted me to the session in the first place.
One thing that I will say is that attendence certainly seems to be down from last year, with some of the technical sessions only having a couple of hundred people. The BOFs weren't that much popular and the guy that I was speaking to said that the room he was looking after only averaged about 40 people. I guess we can't do anything about the state of the economy but you have to feel for those guys that put all that work into writing the presentations only to have a few people show up. The Argent hotel was pretty empty throughout the BOFs. There wasn't even any refreshments (read, "free beer") for those attendees wanting to get the most out of the conference. I remember JavaOne '99 - they had two floors of stuff going on.
Oh well, despite the lack of free beer I've certainly learnt alot. JSF, web services, Jini, JavaSpaces, JXTA, generics, SVG ... the list goes on. I look forward to getting my hands on the slides for sessions that I missed. There have also been some great news announcements, even if they haven't been hyped as much as they should have. I also think that the whole conference infrastructure was much better this year with the WiFi spots in Moscone North and the Alumni room. All in all it's been a great week.
Right, I'm off to dinner with the JavaRanch crew. That's all for now, I'll see you back in England.
Combining Jini, JXTA and Brazil's national drink
The last conference session that I went to was about how Jini and JXTA could be combined to really extend the reach of Jini outside of the normal network boundaries. If you've not seen Jini, it provides a really cool automatic service discovery network and this is implemented using IP multicast meaning that it just won't work on the wider, e.g. Internet, network. To get around this problem, several people have tried implementing Jini lookup services on top of JXTA's P2P networking facilities. There are several ways in which this can be done, and these range from rewriting the networking stack within Jini to providing a JXTA-aware proxy for all local Jini clients. All of the work is still in progress but they've done some amzing research. Just imagine being able to hook up your laptop to the internet and have it automatically discover other services, or be discovered itself. This is smart stuff.
BTW, if you didn't go to this session (hosted by Brazil's very own JavaMan) then you will have missed how to mix Brazil's national drink! Don't worry though, you'll be able to download the slides and try it out. ;-)
