Another JavaONE bites the dust

It's been a fun, and hectic JavaONE as usual. Gone are the days of my first J1 when I got to attend as a corporate developer, and all I had to do was find sessions I wanted to attend, grab as much schwag as I could cram into my carry-on, and find the coolest parties giving away free drinks. Now, I'm in the 'industry' and I usually have my days packed with interviews, client meetings, and catching up with friends and ex-colleagues.

Overall, each year the open source vendors seem to take more and more space on the floor, and it was good to see JBoss out here with a pretty significant presence, and I managed to catch up with with some of the old JBoss ESB team. The overall comment I got back from the ESB team was that demand for their open source ESB is pretty high, and that validates a lot of what I'm seeing with WSO2's products. Consumption and awareness of open source vs. commercial products is, in my opinion, at an all-time high.

So was there anything really cool and interesting @ J1? Not really - Sun rehashed a lot of the same very professional and slick videos - give them credit for this, they must spend a fortune on the video's they make. Really well done, and the entertainment is also of very high quality. Am I so impressed with their tech. announcements? Not really. I am not downplaying their stuff, like JavaFX, but that was a rehash of a lot of what was shown last year. I think they could reach out to the Java community more and highlight a lot more then just their API's and tech stack cause I think the vendors out there, especially the open source ones are the ones disrupting and creating the interesting tool's with Java.

One thing that gets more and more evident is the viral like nature which Java has invade the mobile cell makers. Is anyone using the PocketPC stuff much? I hardly see anyone in my circle of friends and family buying any of those heavy and bulky, battery guzzling phones. Everyone has Nokia's or Motorolla's or BlackBerry's, iPhones - all heavily laden with Java.

Overall, as always, I tell anyone contemplating coming to J1 and the $ investment - yes do it. It's worth it, not for the Sun/Java announcements, but for the value of networking with your peers, learning from others facing similar challenges, and seeing what others have done with Java and related tech.

Till the next one...