Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog: JavaOne Archives

I went to JavaOne 2005, and my impressions back then were not very favorable. Much has changed since then (well, we still had a few cheap applauses at the opening keynote), and this year it has been a much more pleasurable experience. John Gage is a very engaging (pun intended) speaker (*), and he specifically asked each one of the attendees to have a list of 20 people you haven't known before by the end of the conference. John, i tried my hardest, and here is the list of 21 (yes, that's one more than you have asked) names (i have to admit that i cheated a bit since i've met few of the people at Desktop Matters a few months ago).

1 - Alex Potochkin, my co-presenter. Quite a few lengthy ICQ sessions, long e-mail threads and API discussions finally leading to the Rainbow project.
2, 3 - Richard Bair and David Qiao that have graciously agreed to participate in our late night BoF on component development. Even though it had been at 10PM (against the Grinder Girl party and a few other interesting BoFs), we had about 50 people and a very interesting discussion.
4, 5 - Hans Muller and Amy Fowler, two of my Swing heroes who were the members of the original Swing team. Amy was gracious enough to hear me rant about BasicTabbedPaneUI (which went on even after she said that she wrote some parts of it), and now i hate it a little bit less :)
6-8 - the great team behind java.net, including Chris Adamson, Marla Parker and Sarah Kim (a blog is missing?) Thanks for great chats, having me present a mini-talk at the community corner and the very, very, very comfortable sofas (although i prefer not to think about all the places they have been before).
9-12 - the rest of the Swing developers that i had a chance to sit with, Chet Haase, Romain Guy, Chris Campbell and Jasper Potts.
13-15 - fellow look and feel developers, Luan O'Carroll, Fred Lavigne and Mike Swingler from Apple (next dinner is on us). Some interesting discussions have started, and i hope that we'll continue them.
16-18 - fellow bloggers Augusto Sellhorn, Andres Almiray and Michael Nascimento Santos. Nice to finally put a face (and a voice) to a blog. Thanks for bumping into me and letting me ramble incoherently.
19 - Kohsuke Kawaguchi. If i had to pick one person to be professionally jealous of, it would be him. An amazing number of solid projects on java.net, ranging from continous integration to an orb that glows red on build failure (and much more).
20 - Cay Horstmann for a great chat on JavaFX
21 - Geertjan Wielenga and letting go of the grunge :)

So, here John, this is the list that you have asked for. And if i have to pick my favorite speaker this year, it would be Ben Galbraith who has delivered two excellent technical sessions on Swing development. If you missed those, just go grab the PDF slides from the content site.

(*) As mentioned way more eloquently than i ever could hope at BileBlog, You find yourself wanting to have children just so you could sell them to him; surely he’d know what to do with them better than you would.

JavaOne - what a cool, next-generation, Brazilian experience

Posted by kirillcool on July 02, 2005 at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Oh, well. What did we have?

A lot of supposedly cool stuff (even had an entire track for that), that wasn't anywhere near being usable, useful, or cool for that matter.
A lot of next-generation stuff, that will take at least 3-4 years to make its way into real-world enterprise applications (yes, it will take uncounted hundreds of millions of dollars for real systems to move from J2EE 1.3.1).
A lot of cheap applause from Brazilian programmers (felt like a horde of puppets sometimes, but as long as people are happy...).
An amazingly annoying Finch puppet (note the nice interoperability with the previous item). I guess its creator likes it, but who else in the JUGs? Even John Gage was forced to play along and listen to it. Next in line - the guy in the Duke costume (i was told that they worked in shifts). My picture was way out of focus. I'll be on my way to buy that HP camera real soon.
A wonderfully disappointing track on desktop (i have attended at least 10 sessions and BoFs on this one), only to be matched by the shallowness of "Swing hacks" with stunning amount of typos, discrepancies between the code and the comments, and code style. But then again, i only got to #45. Nice to know, though, that a sizeable portion of Java 2D team has been working for three weeks on turning a non-existing application into an extreme looking one.
An educating insight into Dolphin's future by Mark Reinhold. Unfortunately, he has asked me to refrain from putting the screenshots of his slides on the web, so i'll patiently wait (hopefully not too long) for his entry on the subject to put my 2c in.
A stunning amount of James Gosling look-a-likes. Guys, seriously, the long gray hair may look fine on James, but not on you. Just shell out a few bucks and cut it. Really. Even set up a PayPal account, and i'll gladly chip in.
A fair amount of nightmares when John Gage repeatedly tells me that I have only 58 hours left to make new friends. Only to be matched by the obnoxious behaviour of xfy's marketing guys. And may be by the amazing number of people who were actually willing to sit down and listen to that **** to get a t-shirt in the end.
Speaking of xfy - the technical people couldn't even tell me why it's better than OpenOffice or MS Office. Well, why should i buy it exactly?
And speaking of the pavillion floor - nice experience with one of the Sun's WebStart guys that couldn't answer my question (not an easy one) and then was apparently relieved when his shift ended. Didn't even finish the conversation properly, just looked the other way and started to talk with the next shift guy. Way to go!
The naming convention for next Java products is OK, but can the marketing guys please stop? Pretty please? I know you have to show that you bring value to the organization, but how about enough? Not only did you make the slides look ridiculous, you even got your own people confused (Graham and Mark had contradicting points of view on the time of the next naming change). Pretty please, can you choose something and then let it live? Maybe you (the lawyers / marketing people) didn't attend the sessions, but even your own technical guys were making fun of you (indirectly) on each slide with "Java TM Platform Standard Edition" that replaced "Java".
Had my own BoF attended by almost 18 people (but then again, it started at 19:30 on Wednesday, in the middle of the "Bash the next geek you see" party).
And please! We know you are Brazilian. Heard it quite a few times. Brazil everybody (wait a few seconds for applause). Blah blah blah (notice that the audience is dozing off) Brazil (wait for applause). Rinse and repeat.

And now - the promised cartoon. I could call it "cool" or even "next-generation". However, it's a simple still shot of my wall map with an assorted sprinkle of spray primitive in Microsoft (should i shoot myself for not using a true Open-Source product?) Paint:

And yes, Hani, it was a long flight, i went to sessions (some good, some bad, no explanations why), i met people (it was cool, remind myself to cut right arm for using this word again), JSF could kick ass if i bothered enough to use it, NetBeans is great (i don't work for Sun, honest), and here's a picture (he does look perplexed, doesn't he?)

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