Experiencing OSCON Java from Afar (for Those Who Didn't Attend)

It's becoming clear that if you didn't attend OSCON Java, you missed something special. In his post OSCON Java Makes a Difference, Stephen Chin called it "one of the greatest Java events since the collapse of Sun." On OSCON Java Day 2, JavaWorld's Athen OShea opened a blog post with: "O'Reilly's OSCON Java in summary so far: Good crowd, high quality sessions, and an unbeatable rock star to attendee ratio." That same day, java.net Community Manager Sonya Barry said:

I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the show so far. It's always difficult to kick off a new conference, but I think O'Reilly nailed it.

The great majority of us, of course, didn't attend OSCON Java. But that doesn't have to stop us from experiencing some of the key events that took place there. In addition to the blog posts I quoted above, Tori Wieldt posted OSCON Java: Already Great just before the conference began, discussing the weekend events that preceded the conference, and providing quotes overheard at the OSCON Java Speakers Dinner. After the conference ended, Arun Gupta, a conference speaker, published his OSCONJ 2011 Trip Report.

Harold Carr provides a day-by-day depiction of his week at OSCON (including OSCON Java) in a five-post series:

• OSCON Monday
• OSCON Tuesday
• OSCON Wednesday
• OSCON Thursday
• OSCON Friday

Moving on to videos, O'Reilly created an OSCON 2011 playlist on YouTube, that includes (as I write this) nine videos from OSCON Java:

• Steven G. Harris, "Open Source, Java, and Oracle -- Cracking the Code"
• Patrick Curran, "Who Needs Standards?"
• Martin Odersky, "Working Hard to Keep It Simple"
• Raffi Krikorian, "Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM"
• Joe Darcy, "JDK 7 in a Nutshell"
• Josh Bloch, "Java: The Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts"
• Jim Weaver, "JavaFX in the Real World"
• Bob Lee, "On The Cusp Of A Java Renaissance"
• Sarah Novotny and Edd Dumbill: Why OSCON Java?

InsideHPC has also published a video recorded at OSCON Java, Interview: Martin Odersky on Scala.

OSCON Java presentations are beginning to show up on the OSCON 2011 Speaker Slides & Video site. Toby Crawley has separately published his OSCON Java TorqueBox Presentation slides.

Finally, if 140-characters is all you can digest at a sitting, there's the #osconj Twitter feed.

So, even if you weren't able to attend OSCON Java 2011, with all of the above, you can surely occupy yourself for hours experiencing it from afar -- while you start planning your attendance at OSCON Java 2012 (July 16-18, Portland, Oregon, US).

java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, Fabrizio Giudici posted a new java.net blog:

• Fabrizio Giudici, Worried about Java 7? Go with Hudson (or Jeskins).

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks "When do you expect Java 7 enhancements to become part of your code base?" Voting will be open until Friday, August 5.

Articles

Our latest java.net article is Nadine McKenzie's Streamline JSF Development with These 3 Facelets Must-Knows.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

• Masoud Kalali presents A walkthrough for the fork/join framework introduced in Java SE 7;
• John Yeary reports that Java User Group Augsburg (JUG Augsburg) Graduates Incubator;
• Adam Bien talks about Searching for Suscpicious (Superfluous) Interfaces with IntelliJ;
• Stephen Chin reports that OSCON Java Makes a Difference;
• Yolande Poirier talks about an Oracle plan for Moving Java Forward: New Java Training!;
• Shai Almog talks about Drag And Drop Support In LWUIT;
• Jim Weaver presents EarthCubeFX on JavaFX 2.0 from OSCON/Java 2011 Keynote (w/code download);
• Markus Eisele sorts through the Java 7 bug commotion in Don't Use Java 7? Are you kidding me?; and
• Arun Gupta presents his OSCONJ 2011 Trip Report.

Spotlights

Our latest java.net href="http://www.java.net/archive/spotlight">Spotlight is Nadine McKenzie's article Streamline JSF Development with These 3 Facelets Must-Knows:

Facelets offers a powerful way to organize and streamline JSF development. When a cat is thrust into the air, it magically lands upright and safely on its feet. Sadly, this is not always the case with software especially when tinctured with aggressive timelines and insufficient requirements. Facelets is to JSF what the magic is to the cat and can help avoid a CAT-astrophe...

Our previous Spotlight was the announcement, Java SE 7 Has Been Released!:

After nearly five years of collaboration within the worldwide Java community, Java SE 7 has been released and is ready for download! With Project Coin, the new Fork/Framework, the New File System API (NIO.2), and more. Java SE 7 is an important step in Java's evolution. Download Java 7!

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-- Kevin Farnham

Twitter: @kevin_farnham