Time to hit the pool

It's Memorial Day in the U.S., the unofficial start of Summer. The only thing standing between me and the swimming pool is writing this blog.

So, it's going to be short.

But seriously, there was a comment on the latest java.net poll that I wanted to make note of. On our poll about "What's your reaction to Sun's JavaOne 2006 announcements?" ilazarte, asked "no seriously, what announcements" and had this to say:

i followed java.net and javalobby and even some artima waiting for the "bulleted list" of important information and it never came. i dont want to download a damn audio file, i dont want to meander through someones damn blog, JUST GIVE ME THE INFO

Well, sorry if our coverage wasn't what you were looking for, but for the last three years (i.e., every year since java.net was launched at JavaOne 2003), we've used our bloggers as the primary form of coverage. We think this has the effect of filling the front page with fresh material from the technical sessions, the pavilion floor, the birds-of-a-feather meetings, announcements from projects, and the overall feel of the conference.

If you want consolidated notes just from the announcements in the keynotes, News.com's JavaOne page offered a pretty traditional coverage of what news was made.

But honestly, having done a few of these shows now, the keynotes seem to me the least interesting part of JavaOne. By a wide margin. As in: given a choice between staying up late for BoF's and getting up early for keynotes, stay up late, because there's more and better stuff in the BoF's than the keynotes.

JavaOne is the polar opposite of Apple's WWDC, which will take place across the street in Moscone West in August. In that show, the keynote totally sets the tone for the whole show, and usually launches surprise technologies that will then be covered in the technical sessions. I think the key difference is one of transparency: Apple, with its proprietary technologies, keeps its cards close to its chest and can unleash them in the keynote for maximum effect. Java is developed in the open, under the aegis of the JCP, so there's rarely any surprise because the contents of a given release are known months or years in advance. Indeed, the one big surprise of JavaOne was the Google Web Toolkit, which made a splash precisely because it could be developed in secret and unleashed with a surprise announcement... which isn't an option for Java itself. And I think most of us are pretty happy about having that kind of transparency.

Speaking about making a splash, did I mention that it's 85° (33°C), and there's a swimming pool down the block waiting for me?