Skip to main content

Talk To Ya Later

Posted by editor on March 5, 2007 at 11:00 AM EST

Some of the JavaOne speakers reveal themselves

In last Friday's blog, I wondered aloud why we hadn't heard of more people blogging about their JavaOne acceptances or rejections. That got a couple of approved speakers out of the woodwork, and we'll get to those in a minute.

But what about blogging about your talk that wasn't approved? Is that assumed to be sour grapes by its nature? I wouldn't assume that, not for a minute. There may be a great deal of value understanding where Java's going -- or at least where the JavaOne program committee thinks it's going -- based on what didn't get accepted. Are there old warhorses whose talks got turned down? That could be a sign that they've fallen out of favor. Or maybe the idea was good but the proposal wasn't? There's a certain "sell" you have to make with conference proposals, an understanding of how to appeal to the program committee. Surely there are talks that would have gotten a better reception from attendees than from the program committee.

And sometimes the program committee gets it wrong. Tapestry creator Howard Lewis Ship complained in his blog after getting turned down for OSCON 2006. His rejection was an oversight that was later corrected.

Finally, JavaOne isn't the only game in town. This week alone we have three smaller, focused Java conferences: EclipseCon, the Java Posse Roundup and Desktop Matters. Add to this the growing prominence of some of the larger JUG-hosted conferences, like JavaPolis and JavaZoom. Who knows... if you blog about your rejected JavaOne session and you get some good feedback, maybe that'll lead you to present it at one of these other conferences.

For what it's worth, Daniel Steinberg and I proposed a java.net BoF, like we do every year. And like every year, it was turned down. We also proposed one about the open source projects on java.net to the new Open Source track. That was turned down too. Happens to everybody.

Continuing on to today's Weblogs, we find a couple of speakers offering previews of their sessions. In My Java One Talks, Joshua Marinacci writes: "Yes it's true, a BoF for my secret project that I've been working on with Robert Cooper has been accepted, so if you don't make it to the Java Posse Roundup next week where we officially release it then try to come to JavaOne or just keep checking my blog for more details."

Next, Tom Ball previews My JavaOne Talk on Advanced Refactoring: "My JavaOne talk, "TS-9861: Advanced Java Programming Language Refactoring: Pushing the Envelope", was just accepted. It will both be about some of the radical transformers I'm currently working on, but more importantly about how the current state of tools technology can be used by other developers to push the refactoring envelope further."

On a different note, David Van Couvering looks at open-source's effect on How To Get a Job in Software: "Every now and then a friend contacts me or hooks me up with someone saying they are interested in getting into high tech, particularly software. I have come to understand that because of open source, how you do this has completely changed since I got into the industry."

In Java Today, the Norwegian Java User Group, javaBin, has announced the Call For Papers for the JavaZone 2007 conference, taking place in Oslo, Norway, on September 12-13, 2007. The conference will offer a combination of technical talks and panels in an intimate atmosphere with 2000-2400 attendees. Last year's conference treated more than 1400 software professionals to more than 90 sessions in six parallel tracks, with speakers such as Joshua Bloch, Gregor Hohpe, Mary Poppendieck, Kevlin Henney, Bruce Tate and Ken Schwaber.

Did you have a Mac back in the System 7 era? Do you remember "balloon help", a contextual help metaphor that used tooltip-like text boxes with tails pointing to the relevant widget, making them look like word balloons from comics? This same idea informs the new Balloon Tips for Java project, which offers a Swing implementation of the same idea, bringing balloon tips to all Java platforms.

The latest SDN interview offers A Conversation With Sun Microsystems Technology Evangelist Brian Goetz. "At Sun, [Brian] serves as a consultant on a wide range of topics that extend from Java concurrency to the needs of Java developers, and he contributes to the development of the Java platform. We met with him to get his thoughts on Java technology performance challenges, Java Platform, Standard Edition 6 (Java SE 6), common performance hazards, the challenges of moving from C to Java programming, and ways to write better code."

This week's Spotlight is on Java on the small device. Do you know of a great mobile application or service that runs on Java ME? The Java Mobile Application Video Contest is your chance to tell the world about it, and maybe just pick up a sweet prize. To enter, create a video of up to three minutes that references Java ME or the open-source phoneME technology used, and post it to YouTube. Prizes include a Ericsson K800 phone, Panasonic Blu-Ray DVD Player, an Amazon.com gift certificate, and PlayStation 3 consoles. Check the official rules and post your video by April 27.

In today's Forums, helicopter spots a huge performance weakness in Re: ImageIO Mac OS X. "For all those interested in: It seems the JPEG loading using Mac OS X / Java SE is very poor. It is native but the C code isn't optimized using SSE (Intel) or AltiVec (PPC) instructions which makes a huge difference! Benchmark loading some 30-50kb JPEG using ImageIO.read() -- Pentium 4 / Ubuntu Linux 6.10: 3-9ms... G5 1,8 Single / Mac OS X Tiger: 50-90ms"

rah003 wonders what's behind a request for high-resolution timing in Re: Feature Requests. "Can't speak for future plans, but did you already hit the limits with current implementation? Considering this library is meant for relatively simple animations of UI elements and the fact that highest achievable resolution varies widely between different systems I can't come up with a use case which would require that. I used it in few places already and seems to be working just fine for me."

georgew is putting out a call for attention in Who is the JDIC project team? "One gets the impression that the original team no longer works on this project and that nobody has taken responsibility for continuing it. Of course I could be wrong and if so I apologise, but just so that we know, can the JDIC project team please identify themselves?"

Current and upcoming Java Events :

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.



Some of the JavaOne speakers reveal themselves
Blog Links >>