Graham Hamilton's Blog

February 2005 Archives

JavaOne Review Madness

The JavaOne call for papers ended last week. We received over 1700 proposals and we're now deep in talk review. Here are a few thoughts from inside the Program Committee on what we're seeing in the submissions so far and the balance we're working towards this year. We want to deliver a great and useful conference for people, so we're consciously trying to make sure we have the right balance of topics.

What do people want?

There are some common strands in the feedback we receive from JavaOne attendees. For example, most people want to see increased technical depth and less introductory fluff. But there are also a lot of differences in the kinds of talks people want and the areas they want covered. We try to be pragmatic in meeting people's needs, and one of the criteria we use in balancing the conference is to look at what kinds of talks people did (and didn't) attend in previous years.

There tends to be very strong interest in the practicalities of building real-world enterprise applications, on both client and server and we'll make sure those areas are well-covered. But there is also a lot of interest in future directions and in emerging technology areas. JavaOne is really the only event where the full diversity of Java development comes together under one roof and people seem to value being able to sample that whole diversity, even if their main focus is more narrow.

Standard v non-standard technologies?

JavaOne is definitely the great annual festival of JCP standard technologies. So we try to make sure we have talks covering the latest key JSRs, especially on the main directions for the core platforms. We'll definitely have lots of "how to" talks on J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) and J2EE 1.4, and forward looking talks on the plans for J2SE 6.0 (Mustang) and J2EE 5.0. We have a lot of good submissions here (and we also know where to go hunting to fill in any gaps!)

But there are also lots of other technologies being used by the community beyond JSRs. This year we're making a deliberate effort to have more talks here. For example, the track owners have been actively recruiting talks on technologies such as Hibernate, the Spring Framework, SWT, Tapestry, etc. So I'm expecting we'll see increased coverage of non-JCP technologies.

Product talks

Product talks are a really sensitive area. We've had some really grumpy feedback from attendees who feel they were abused with a sales pitch. But other people have told us they really like getting updates on key products!

Our current thinking is to try to include a small set of product focused talks, but with two big rules. First, it must be really clear in the talk title that the talk is product focused. (People seem to be be much more tolerant of product focused talks if they know the focus in advance.) Second, the talk must actually be technically interesting, not just sales babble. So typically we'd like a talk from a senior engineering lead on the product.

Last year Steve Wilson organized a great set of tools talks with a common theme of "What's new in XXX" for JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, and other IDEs. That seemed to work really well. We're planning to repeat that again for tools. We're also working to recruit a similar set of product update talks for the main App Server products (Weblogic, Websphere, JBoss, Sun App Server, etc.)

Vendor balance

There tend to be a lot of Sun talks at JavaOne. That largely reflects Sun's role in leading many key JSRs, especially for the core platforms.

But we consciously strive to include the whole community, including all the leading Java product vendors. This sometimes includes doing some deliberate talk recruitment to fill key gaps. Sometimes people who are working head down on products forget about boring events like conferences!

This year I'm seeing a good set of talk proposals from most of the main vendors. The one gap I'm noticing is that so far I haven't run into many submissions from IBM, but we are trying to recruit some specific talks (for example on Eclipse and SWT) to help out there.

The Fashion of the Year

There often seems to be a Fashion of the Year. This year it's SOA and we have received a vast host of SOA talk submissions. That's the good news: the bad news is that many of the abstracts are very similar!

Four years ago XML was new and hot, and we had vast numbers of talk submissions on how to connect XML into JSP or servlets. This was an important topic, but there was only so much that could be said on it and many of the abstracts were duplicative.

Similarly with SOA: it's an important topic and I'm sure we'll include some key talks on it, but probably not in proportion to the number of submissions.

"Practical Experience" talks.

Something weird seems to happen around "Practical Experience" talks. We get told by attendees that they want to see more talks based on real-world experience, but in practice average attendance tends to be low and audience feedback is very mixed.

Part of the problem here is that these talks can easily degenerate into "what I did on my summer holidays" kinds of talks. The audience wants more than just a simple narrative of what someone did in their project.

We will be accepting some practical experience talks, but we are going to be more cautious in trying to make sure there will be real lessons for the audience and we will try to work more closely with the speakers in preparing these talks.

Back to work

Well, this was a nice break, but now I have to get back to reading more session abstracts...

                                                                                        - Graham

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