Java One 2009 – Summary
Posted on 07. Jun, 2009 by todd in Java
Summary
In the blink of an eye the 2009 edition of Java One is over. It was a good conference. Not the best Java One I’ve been to but still very much worth the trip down to San Francisco. The biggest unknown is what impact Oracle’s purchasing of Sun will have on Sun’s direction of Java. There is a ton of momentum in Sun and in the community that Oracle would do well to respect initially. Seeing Larry Ellision on stage speaking with Scott McNealy about investing in the platform is a very good thing. On this, only time will tell. As expected Java/FX featured prominently in many of the sessions. I think this technology has some potential if Sun (and Oracle) stick with it. Sun has a habit of taking things to almost complete and then letting it languish. In many cases the community picks up the loose ends and tries to add libraries, frameworks etc. but that is getting old. There is a lot of engineering resources being placed on Java/FX right now and it looks like it’s tracking pretty well. I’m cautiously optimistic that they can pull this off.
I continue to be very excited about the momentum behind Groovy and related projects (Grails and Griffon). If nothing else, I came away from this year’s Java One with a renewed sense of optimism about the direction of this language and the community behind it. I got to meet a few people that I’ve only ‘met’ through twitter from the Groovy and Griffon community and that’s great.
Areas I’ll be digging into further in the coming days/weeks/months
Teracotta’s Hibernate caching
JIRA
Hudson
Google Collections
Ribbon Component and the Substance Look and Feel
Griffon
Areas that I’ll be keeping my eye on
Java/FX, specifically components and layout managers.
Language Workbench from JetBrains
Here are a few stats:
3 Keynote presentations attended
15 Technical Sessions
7 Birds of a Feather Sessions
Visited with a ‘bunch’ of vendors including a great hour with the guys at Atlassian talking about Jira, Clover and Bamboo
Met up and visited with a number of aquaintences and friends that I’ve me over the years at Java One, Java Posse Roundup and now on Twitter.
Ken, Joe, Carl, Dick, Brendan, Pete, Stefan, Andres, Dave and Fred.
Java One for me is more about the community and the conversation than it is about the technical content.