JavaOne trend spotting... sort of.

JavaOne talks are full of numbers... 1 billion JavaCards, 550 worldwide Java user groups, 912 members of the JCP, 28 J2EE compliant app servers, 45,000 Java applications for cell phones, 78% of handsets shipping in 2005 are Java-enablied, and on and on. So I thought I'd offer up a few other random metrics that might mean something. Or nothing.

Non-technical stats:

* Number of people waiting in line to have their picture taken with Duke: I counted at least 50 at the moment I walked by the line. People who paid $2000 to be here were skipping sessions to get a Polaroid of themselves standing next to a guy wearing a Duke suit. Let that sink in.

* Number of t-shirts I was able to get in one pass on the show floor: 5. Without really trying. Surely the improvement in booth giveaways means something. It's not like the old days, but last year, I swear I was lucky to walk away with a white paper.

Technical stats:

* Day one's most heavily attended sessions (announced at day two's keynote):

1) JBI - foundation for SOA (so popular in fact, that they're repeating it. Too many people wanted in but were turned away).

2) 1.5 Language Features

3) Josh Bloch's famous puzzler session

4) EJB 3.0

5) Next generation web services

6) JAXB

So, the Java Business Integration thing was the #1 most popular session yesterday.

Today, the "Java at the movies" session on the Blu-Ray spec was completely full, door closed, turning people away. I reckon it was one of today's most popular sessions.

* Day one's top-selling books at the show bookstore:

1) Java puzzlers

2) Swing Hacks (Yay! Java on the Desktop obviously lives)

3) Maven Developers Notebook

4) Head First Design Patterns

5) Hibernate in Action

6) JBoss 4.0 official guide 7) JBoss Developers Handbook

8) Spring in Action

9) Java Language Spec, third edition

10) Refactoring

11) Spring Live

12) Killer Game Programming in Java

What can we infer from this? Not sure, but notice that the word "hacks" and "killer" are both in the list. And both Spring and JBoss each have two books in the list.

Stay tuned for results of tomorrow's "cool hunt".