Jason Hunter's Blog

June 2003 Archives

Living Vicariously Through Blogs

I'm surprised how much fun I've had reading (and writing) the Java.net weblogs today. JavaOne always has five things going on at once, and people's blog entries let me experience vicariously some of the four things I didn't choose. The whole thing reminds me of those "Day in the Life" books. It's great fun to have a whole set of bloggers concentrating on the same event.

In years past I helped write the JavaOne Today online magazine where we had fixed article assignments. While informative, JOT lacked the immediacy and casual commentary that blogs provide. (Oh, and here in my blog unlike JOT I can say Java without any lawyer-mandated "technology" or "programming language" noun follow-up whose sole purpose is to make Java an adjective and thus more trademarkable. At least I think I can, we'll soon find out. Java, Java, Java!)

This afternoon as I walked from one end of Moscone to the other I found myself stopping at the public access terminals just to read blog entries -- no WiFi, laptop's useless, gotta use these things called terminals. I wanted to see what was happening, what was interesting. In comparison, my JavaOne Today paper (oddly it's paper again) is stale news, officially blessed, and folded in my backpack unread.

I also like having the blogger headshots. A few bloggers I knew only by name, and now I can recognize them on the floor and introduce myself.

"Session Full"

For the first technical session I tried to see Doug Lea talk about concurrency utilities. He's the guy behind the famed util.concurrent library and a good speaker to boot. But when I got there, the doors were shut with a sign "Session Full". Even when someone left they wouldn't let anyone new in. So I wandered by the JavaServer Faces talk. Wouldn't ya know, it has a "Session Full" sign too.

Maybe this is a good sign that people are still coming to JavaOne. Maybe it's a bad sign that they didn't book bigger rooms. But the practical moral of the story is: show up early or don't show up at all.

InfoWorld: "Java.net: The JCP Alternative?"

InfoWorld just published an article on how Java.net and the JCP might interact, and my name appears in the first sentence! Boy when you see that you hold your breath and hope the reporter got things right. You never know what crazy things you might find attributed to you. Happily, Bob McMillan usually gets the facts right, and he did pretty well here.

Now, I think the article's gratuitously melodramatic in jumping from my keynote speech last year to my thoughts that JDOM doesn't need to go through the JCP. The two issues aren't really related. The agreement announced last year was (primarily) that open source licenses were Ok for JSR implementations and that Sun would support that. That's already benefitted projects like Apache Axis. It never meant that the JCP would become a sort of hosting ground for open source projects.

I frequently advise people to let their business critical functions depend only on things that are either documented "standards" with multiple vendors or that are open source projects. Each provides protection from a single company deciding to discontinue support for what you depend on. It's ideal if you can have both -- an open source project that went through the JCP to be seen as a de facto standard -- but it's not required and is not always worth the effort. In my case with JDOM, I have limited time to volunteer, and I'd rather spend the time I can offer working on the software itself rather than navigating the JCP river. I had more time in the past, but I spent it working on the JCP 2.5 changes which I thought and still believe were more important.

If someone working on JDOM wanted to volunteer to lead the JCP portion of the project, I think that'd be great. I haven't officially cancelled the JSR because I'm hoping that might happen. But so far it seems open source folks prefer code to politics. Who can blame them?

BTW, I'm on a panel talking about the JCP, open source, and Java.net. It's Wednesday right after lunch and led by Frank Sommers. (12:15pm, Esplanade 303)

The Draw of JavaOne?

Something funny happened last night. My fiancee Kathlyn, who lives two hours away in central California, was brainstorming how she could find time to stop by during JavaOne. She came over last year, the year before that, and I think even the year before that. Tough to know, the shows kind of blur together.

What's odd is, she's not a programmer. She's an occupational therapist. Her career and Java programming intersect only when she's fixing the hands and wrists we wear out with too much typing. (It's a story for another day how great it is to have your own personal OT.) So I wonder, what's drawing her to JavaOne?

If you answered, "It's you, dummy" well then thank you very much! I like that answer. But I'm here every week. Something's drawing her to the show, and I think it's the people and the party atmosphere. Turns out that's the same reason I'm going this year.

Fast fact: last year I went to just two talks. One of them I was speaking. This year will probably be the same. Sure, I have plans to hit a pile of talks and used the handy-dandy online schedule builder, but I know in the end the people I run into will be so much more interesting. Chatting, networking, and catching up. Dinners and drinks at night. It's all about the people, and you don't even have to be a geek to have fun.

Or maybe it's the nifty prizes. Kathlyn loves my (now her) JavaOne wheeled travel bag. Could be she's just hoping for a matching handbag?

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