Van Riper's Blog

May 2008 Archives

JavaOne Day Two - Personal Highlights

Helping a high school student get a Sun SPOT from Sun for his school computer club has to be number one. The Java Champions BOF was pretty interesting. I wonder how many people know you don't have to be a Java Champion to attend this BOF. Bob Brewin, the Sun CTO, was taking questions from the Java Champions for the first half of this session. I was also fortunate to receive an invite to attend the NLJUG meeting with James Gosling at noon. On the party front, The Eclipse party at the Thirsty Bear was my favorite. However, I only attended 3 of the many parties going on that night. =)

If you are a developer working on the part of the system that end users interact with, I highly recommend the talk by Ben Galbraith on creating a compelling user experience (TS-6929). I did a fair amount of interaction design work earlier in my career. I found his content spot on with respect to educating user interface developers on what they should learn themselves and what aspects really benefit from the input of a user experience specialist.

I stumbled onto an interesting company, Pervasive Software, simply because they had a novel pen that clips easily to your badge holder and I had lost my pen. In return for the pen, I spent some time at their small booth and was impressed with what I saw. Without writing any special code, they have a solution (Pervasive DataRush) that will transparently take full advantage of multi-core processors for computation intensive tasks. It was pretty cool.

There is much more to write about, but, I will have to update this entry later. It is time to start drinking from the JavaOne fire hose for yet another day.

JavaOne Day One - Personal Highlights

Seeing JavaFX applications running on Android. Attending the JavaFX overview session by Christopher Oliver. Seeing Neil Young talk about the project to make his vast archive of musical work available using Java and Blue Ray technologies. He had been waiting since the 80's for the right combination of hardware and software technology to do this.

Technically, the three most interesting things for me on Tuesday were:

• JavaFX has come a long way since the initial splash at last year's conference. I will have to give it a serious look now.
• GlassFish V3 Kernel with a lightweight web profile looks interesting. I would sure like to see this as the basis for a Google App Engine Java Runtime. :-)
• Although not a new announcement at JavaOne, I was able to learn more about the SpringSource Application Platform directly from the SpringSource folks and it looks promising.

My last presentation for the week was over just in time for the evening reception in the JavaOne Pavilion. The demo gods were not smiling on me with network connectivity issues again. I should have learned by now to *never* count on network connectivity for a successful demo at a conference. Sigh!

In the evening, I attended the JUG Community BOF where we had a lively discussion. The most interesting thing I learned there was the promise that new infrastructure is coming real soon (sometime this summer) for us to use when hosting JUG projects on java.net. I'm supposed to get a preview demo of the capabilities of this new infrastructure later this week. I am looking forward to that.

JavaOne Day Zero AKA CommunityOne

This year's CommunityOne was definitely an upgrade over last year. I thought it was pretty good last year too. The price/performance (free) was excellent and the turnout was good. My one gripe as a presenter was the lack of internet connectivity for my session.

Speaking of my session, it went well. Sun even surprised us by providing a second Sun SPOT so that there were two lucky JUGs that won in the raffle at the end of the session. We had 40 JUG Leaders easily in the room. Some pictures were taken that I'll post here eventually.

When I went to MIT, they had a saying that getting an education there was like drinking from a firehose. I find the experience at CommunityOne/JavaOne to be similar. There are so many options it is almost overwhelming.

Personally, I wanted to attend the Startup Camp and had to miss a critical part of the startup speedgeeking contest due to overlaps with my own session. I sent this tweet about the winner of the Best Startup contest earlier today.

There was also another unconference going on in addition to Startup Camp. Which is on top of the 10 or so parallel technical tracks running all day long including hands-on labs. The day ended with a nice reception (much better than the one last year).

I'm looking forward to a full day tomorrow. I have heard rumors that there will be some interesting demos at the keynote session in the morning. We shall see. You can find me tomorrow in the CommunityCorner giving my mini-talk on the Java User Groups International Map at 6pm.

Finally, I admit it. I'm the classic geek that collects t-shirts at conferences. I may set a new personal record this year. I wasn't even trying and I came back to my room with four new shirts today. At this rate, I'm going to need to buy an extra piece of luggage to cart them all home. :-)

The Most Amazing Thing Of All

... is I get paid for doing this. I'm not actually paid to run my JUG, but, my company supports my involvement including giving me paid time off to attend the full JavaOne conference each year.

JavaOne is next week and it is going to be so much fun. In particular, I am looking forward to spending time with the other JUG Leaders attending JavaOne from all over the world. I had no idea when I started my own JUG back in 2003 that it would catapult me into such a neat community of intelligent and caring people within the world wide Java User Group Community.

If you ever thought about starting a Java User Group (JUG) of your own, I highly recommend that you attend the JUG Community Panel at CommunityOne on Monday and/or the JUG Community BOF on Tuesday at JavaOne. I don't want to sugar coat it. There is a lot of work involved in running a JUG. For me personally, I am at a point where the rewards greatly surpass the demands of the job.

My advice to anyone considering starting a JUG is to not go it alone. Locally, it is important to find other like-minded individuals to help you build up your local group. Otherwise, it is very easy to burn out. I am so grateful that I found Kevin Nilson to co-lead the Silicon Valley Web JUG. By the way, we are always on the look out for others with energy and passion to join us running our JUG.

Globally, there are many resources available to you through the vibrant international JUG community. The best way to get started is to create a user account at java.net and join the JUG Leaders mailing list. You don't need to have a JUG already up and running to join. In fact, you will probably benefit the most from getting connected to the JUG Leaders community before getting started. You will find the mailing list to be a great source of advice and support.

If you are attending JavaOne next week, I strongly recommend that you visit the Community Corner in the JavaOne Pavilion. You will typically find a mix of JUG Leaders and Java Champions hanging out there pretty much anytime during the conference. Check it out!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.