Java One 2009 – Day 0
Posted on 03. Jun, 2009 by todd in Java
I’m in San Francisco this week for Java One. This may be the last Java One with Oracle buying Sun. Too early to speculate on that but regardless things will be different next year.
I’m down here with a couple of fellows from work, Glen and Shawn. It’s the first time I’ve had any one from Entero down here with me so that’s pretty cool. There is always way to much to see so perhaps with the three of us, we’ll get a chance to cover more content.
We registered (a process that Sun and the conference organizers have pretty much nailed), picked up our conference materials and walked around getting the lay of the land. When the vendor pavilion floor opened, we wandered around there for a bit, picked up a few T-Shirts and bumped into Glen.
The thing I noticed walking around the show floor was the number of larger companies missing that were there in previous years. Oracle had a huge presence last year, this year nothing (probably related to the merger). IBM is not here (sour grapes re:merger ?), Google, not here. There is some alternate universe thing going on as Microsoft is here with a pretty large presence. It’s a bit odd compared to previous years.
Ice Soft
The fellows from Ice Soft are here. My friend Ken is one of the dev leads so it’s always good to catch up with them. He did a demo of some of the new gear they have on the go for their IceFaces product. They stuff they do is pretty cool however it’s all web/ajax/Java Server Faces which is a technology stack we don’t dabble in.
Terracotta
Shawn and I also had a great discussion with a couple of developers from Terracotta. We need to do some serious R&D into a second level cache for our domain layer and Terracotta is probably the way we’re going to go. They are implementing their own hibernate caching strategy within their clustering technology. It has some monitoring and configuration tools that look pretty impressive. Shawn put his name in for the beta program so we’ll take some time in the coming weeks to put Terracotta through it’s paces.
Atlassian
The other company I want to spend some time with is Atlassian. We use a bunch of their products including Crucible, FishEye and Confluence. Pete and Brendan (two fellows I’ve met at the Java Posse Roundup) have pretty senior development/management positions at Atlassian but they were over at the Atlassian summit. I’ll hopefully get a chance to meet up with them later in the week and catch up.
First Impressions
I’m of a bit of mixed mind about Java One this year. On the one hand, it’s great to be in San Francisco, getting a chance to hang out with folks that I’ve come to know over the years. There is always a cool vibe around the conference. It is different though. There does seem to be a certain pall though. Major change is afoot and it seems like there is a lot of uncertainty about the future. I am looking forward to the week though.