I just returned (after a couple of long and fun flights, described on my other blog posting) from JavaPolis, a fantastic conference on all things Java (and some not) in Antwerp, Belgium.

I know what you're thinking: "I wish I could visit northern Europe in December. It's such a gray, wet, cold time of year." And you're right. I found Antwerp particularly inviting to visit with all of the warmest clothes I own; light, cotton articles that are able to sustain freezing California temperatures down to nearly 65 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's true that JavaPolis does not suffer the weather distractions of events in other cities such as San Francisco, Orlando, or Duluth. It's like what a friend of mine said who worked for a large software company in Redmond, Washington. Everyone there works long hours because, well, there's not much reason to go outside between, like, September and June. So you might as well stay in the office and keep hacking. At JavaPolis, you might as well attend another session. Or have another Belgian beer.  Try the Lambic. Or the Geuze. Or the Kriek (cherry-flavored Geuze), if you can find one that's not too sweet.

You should try to attend next year, but register early - it sold out this year. It definitely has the highest chair-comfort-per-Euro of any conference I've been to . Swank movie theaters are awesome for this kind of event. Unless you're the presenter, in which case you have the distinct impression that the entire audience is sleeping through your talk because everyone's settled so comfortably and quietly into their seats.

I'll let other bloggers cover the spectrum of what they saw at the conference. I will just stick to posting my presentations here in case anyone's interested. Note that the Scene Graph and Filthy Makeover sessions will eventually be online in video form at parleys.com; think of these presentations as placeholders until the real deal is posted.

Scene Graph: This presentation was at the end of Richard Bair's university day session, entitled "Swinging RIAs." It's an introduction to the new Scene Graph project posted on java.net, which is a module of the Java FX platform and is now available in early early [early] access form for Java developers.

Filthy Makeover: This presentation was a combination of prior Filthy Rich Clients and as Extreme GUI Makeover talks (from the past couple of JavaOne conferences). The talk covered a sampling of filthy rich techniques and then showed them in action in the context of larger applications from the GUI Makeover talks. Then I walked through some code in the editor to show how, when you get right down to it, the code to enable the effects in real applications is pretty darn close to the code as described for filthy rich clients. The video for this presentation should be particularly interesting, or at least more involved than the slides here, since much of the new content for the talk was in the interactive demos and code walkthroughs, which are represented in this slide deck by less informative "Demo" slides.

Future Java Consumer Releases: This BOF was about the upcoming Update N and Java FX releases, and discussed the various features going into these releases. There won't be a video of this talk (BOF's don't get that special treatment), but the slides are hopefully self-explanatory.