Tue, 06 May 2008

JavaOne - Day 2

The first full day of JavaOne started with breakfast and the general session. The theme this year is "Java + You". This means that Java is moving out among the people -- to the customers. Java runs on all platforms from the embedded application to the cell phone through the workstation to the server. You gotta love it. In fact, most of the talk is not about the desktop or laptop, but about applications which leverage the network through connected devices such as cell phones.

The emphasis seems to be on these devices, especially cell phones. I suppose this is because of the sheer numbers of the devices and the potential for sales. And sales is the bottom line. The speakers at the general sessions mention altruistic reasons for doing things, but come around in the end to monitizing the idea. For those of you who don't speak PRish, "monetizing" means making money. If you can't make money from an idea, it isn't worth considering.

After the general sessions, my day was supposed to consist of three labs. I made it to two. Unfortunately, as often happens, the minute you leave the office, things go to heck. Today was no exception. So I had to miss the last lab and spend my time on the phone and VPN dealing with a production system problem. I got it solved in time for dinner with my coworkers at around eight p.m. Sessions go until 10:30 or so, but I didn't see any which interested me this evening.

One of the sessions wasn't even about Java. It was about Ruby on the JVM using NetBeans 6.1 IDE. Ruby is an interesting language and its Ruby on Rails system is really fun to work with. NetBeans makes it relatively easy by running much of the Rake system for you to create the elements of this MVC framework.

The other session was on interoperable web services development with NetBeans. This one was interesting in that I volunteered my laptop to actually do the work. This means that I now have NetBeans 6.1 loaded on my work laptop.

All-in-all, a pretty good day. I'll read some tonight and be back at it tomorrow morning.

posted 21:19 [/Technology] permanent link