Van Riper's Blog

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.

Comments

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.