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JavaOne 2008: Day Zero

Posted by editor on May 5, 2008 at 12:10 PM EDT

Which JavaOne are you tracking, the one that starts tomorrow or the one that started two days ago?

The show keeps growing every year, as more events are pushed into the days before the official Tuesday start. First it was NetBeans Day and GlassFish Day, which led to today's CommunityOne, now in its second year. But of course, that can't accommodate everything that everyone in the community wants to do, so on Sunday there was a GlassFish unconference, which was captured in photos by Arun Gupta.

And earlier still, the java.net Community Leaders Weekend was held on Saturday. This too was held in an unconference format, with an assortment of community leaders, project leaders, and java.net infrastructure representatives putting their heads together to talk about the ever-evolving java.net community and how best to serve it. One topic that came up several times was that it doesn't make sense for us to provide redundant services if people have third-party services they like better anyways. Dalibor Topic, in particular, pointed out useful services for archiving mailing lists, finding developers, etc., and rather than build these ourselves, we found ourselves saying "how can we expose java.net to the services that developers already use?" There are tricky infrastructure points -- can we tie into third-party social networks when the membership is divided between Facebook, LinkedIn, and Orkut? This isn't a problem we're going to solve in a weekend, but we did come away with a seriously-revised idea of what the community wants from the site, and what role we can and should play in their overall development lives.

We recorded one session from the community leaders weekend to send out as a podcast, but it will take a little more editing to fix up the room mic audio and remove the occasional mobile phone interference, so look for that on the podcast feed later today.

As in previous years, we've switched the front page to a more dynamic, blog-oriented format, so our members can update all the different facets of the JavaOne conference from many angles. On this "day zero", we begin with:

The conferences before the conference
Blog Links >>

Comments

by hexghost - 2008-05-05 20:41

Not to be a voice of negativity, but from my point of view JavaOne is going to have to try really damn hard this year to matter to me, especially after last year's fiasco that was JavaFX. I think one just needs to look around at the Java world a year later and see where JavaFX is - it's a Swing developer's scaled down groovy that hasn't progressed beyond Tetris examples. This isn't some java-is-dead rant, maybe more a JavaOne is merely a big press conference for Sun to release some random software no one will use rant.

by invalidname - 2008-05-05 19:59

Thanks, aberrant. Fixed in both places now.

by aberrant - 2008-05-05 19:36

Just a heads up. The "Timothy M. O'Brien" article links to http://weblogs.java.net/blog/arungupta/archive/2008/05/take_1_pictures_1... instead of what I assume should be his article. This is true for the main page and the Editors blog.