Now that I've recovered from last week it's time for a quick wrap-up. Overall I really enjoyed the conference and, as usual, I've come away motivated and having learnt lots. Compared to last year, it seemed to me that there were more presentations on topics that were not just incremental updates and I guess that's because J2SE/J2EE 5.0 (or whatever it's called today!) are much more stable and have evolved somewhat. However, in saying that, there were still some slots where I wasn't really interested in any of the technical sessions. Still, most of the sessions that I went to were good and our BOFs seemed to go down well too. :-)

One of the things that sparked my interest again during the week is Swing. I developed with Swing pretty much solid for 2 years around 1998/9 and it's interesting to see that Sun are pushing "Java on the client" again. We did some fairly intensive client apps and never really suffered with performance problems. Of course, performance has been improved since the Swing on Java 1.1/1.2 days, but it seems as if native platform integation and providing a better user experience is what's really driving the comeback. I wonder whether this is partially to do with Apple's rise to popularity, particularly with Java developers.

I said this before I went, but JavaOne for me is all about meeting people and that's certainly what I did this year. It was great to meet up with so many people that I exchange e-mails with, people with books and blogs that I read and so on. I even met up with some happy Pebble users.

It was a great week, albeit a very tiring one and thankfully I have another few days before the next London Java meetup.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 07 July 2004 15:17:43 BST #