Simon Phipps's Blog

JavaOne Archives

JavaOne Bloggers Party

If you are in San Francisco next week and you have a blog, you are invited to the Java Bloggers Beer Bash at ,A HREF="http://www.thirstybear.com/">the Thirsty Bear on Wednesday evening. It's co-located with the Open Source unBOF and I believe this year we'll even be providing a little food. 6pm onwards, see you there.

Reserve Seats at JavaOne

I'm just sitting on a preparatory call for JavaOne, and someone mentioned that people with a full conference pass can actually reserve a seat at the technical sessions. Just go use the Schedule Builder and reserve your places!

Bloggers, Beer and JavaOne 2006

As I mentioned yesterday on my other blog,I have just confirmed with the folks at the Thirsty Bear that we can have our annual JavaOne Bloggers Gathering there. So...

Event:

JavaOne Bloggers' Social

Venue

Thirsty Bear Brewing Company

Date & Time

5:30pm-7pm, Tuesday, May 16 2006

Registration:

Please register!

I am expecting some very interesting guests; if you have a blog somewhere you would be most welcome to join us.

The Java Up-tick

I just got off stage at JavaOne Japan, where I was talking about Open Source - the philosophy, the community, the reality. After the talk I was asked how important the union of open source and Java could be. I referred to Tim O'Reilly's Radar presentation at OSCON where he talked about the up-tick in Java books that happened at the end of 2005. He said:

A lot of this growth spurt occurred shortly after JavaOne and the new Tiger release, which happened around that time. All of the top titles were revised, and saw a healthy sales increase as a result. However, when we analyzed new books (versus revisions), it appears that a substantial portion of Java's sustained growth, outside of the classic titles, has come from books on Open Source Java projects, such as Spring, Struts, Lucene, and AspectJ, which collectively performed at nearly double the unit and revenue volumes of new books on their non-Open Source counterparts.

For me, this discovery is very significant. There are plenty of people around talking about "what's next after Java" (there's even an interesting O'Reilly book about it), but it seems to me that the growing trend is not the search for new languages but rather the creation of collaborative communities around the technologies people need to evolve software development. I have said before that programmers don't program using languages, they program by connecting libraries with languages. The delightful growth of Java-based open source communities seems to underline that. I'm not saying we don't need new languages (I wouldn't have advocated the Coyote project if I thought that) but rather that languages aren't the only or even main key to programmer productivity.

Sun's Java EE Implementation Open Source

I was privileged this morning to be the Sun executive doing the morning news call for the world's press at 7:15am here in San Francisco, and thus I had the pleasure of being the one to announce that Sun's implementation of a Java Application Server, Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0, is now open source. Totally delighted to see it happen.

JavaOne - Party Party Party

JavaOne Blogger Meetup

The Dog that Didn't Bark

I really like the report on Corante about java.net but it raises for me the question of why none of the other sources I respect in the blogging community have even mentioned the launch of blogs and wikis on java.net, let alone come in with a critique (positive or negative). In particular, I've not seen anyone in the blogging A-list that I track with NetNewsWire mention or critique java.net, and the greatest omission of all was the lack of any comment on Slashdot (until June 13). What gives? Is there no interest in what Corante (arguably) calls "the first large scale developer community to incorporate wikis and weblogs"?

[Also posted at Webmink]

Decompression

Heading out of town today, I met Mark Thomas from IBM at the Hertz office. Seems he too needs a break after JavaOne. We're both (independently) heading to Yosemite for the weekend - in fact, I am writing this from the 'Happy Burger' in Mariposa ("if it's not perfect, don't serve it" ). I see Duncan's off to Wisconsin, as is Glen. I guess we all need to decompress - I wonder where other participants have gone for the weekend?

Dot-Stuff

I've seen a few people commenting on the new java.xxx URLs - Paul and Bertrand, for example. The java.com site is target for some misunderstanding (some of it great fun!). Rafe Colburn for example says:

Maybe I'm just naive, but I'm convinced that there is little overlap between people who care about Java and people who want a virtual Christina Aguilera on their mobile phone.

When it comes to the java.net site, people have been asking me why the site sounds so like something Microsoft markets. java.org wasn't Sun's to use, so to paraphrase Bono in the lead-in to U2's cover of 'Helter Skelter', "this is the suffix Microsoft stole from the Internet, now we're stealing it back." You can draw your own parallels.

Roundtable report

FTPOnline has a report on the J2EE Roundtable held on Monday.

Elitism?

Alan Williamson wasn't too impressed with Jonathan Schwartz's keynote yesterday, it seems (complete with IDE demos - I hope he's enjoying the Project Rave demo I am watching now!). I'm very interested in his comments on the desire to expand the Java developer base from 3 million to 10 million. He says:

The threshold that we call someone a developer, is going to be dropped significantly ... Sun have historically treated the developer with respect. Giving them the attention and kudos they solely craved. Java developers are real developers; they don't want to be labelled with the Microsoft VB/Marco crowd. Sun will have to be very careful in how they are going to take this forward without alienating and devaluing the current developer base.

The distinction that I'm starting to see is that there no longer seems to be much of a role for a general purpose programmer. The primary skill required of a Java programmer these days seems to be significant expertise in some set of related specifications.

Cruisin'

I'm taking the chance to roam the exhibit hall today and just bumped into my friend Neil Bauman of GeekCruises, who is here promoting events like his Java Jam. I've been a speaker at a couple of his events, and both times have been memorable. Neil's idea is to run training events that deliver the very best speakers (like Sun's Kathy Sierra, whose new book is being well received), provide a compelling personal package by placing the event on a cruise line yet bring it all in at an overall competitive price (he says it better than me). Having got his XML eXcusrsion going a few years back I'm pleased to see he's still winning

Round-table

The last few years I have been privileged to moderate a round-table discussion between the leaders of the J2EE community, hosted by JavaPro magazine. Each year I'm struck by the way there is a diverse competitive landscape for Java. This year the diversity was as strong as ever, with great participants like Ted Shelton from Borland (leading their corporate strategy), Graham Hamilton from Sun (the current brains behind J2SE) and David Litwack from Novell (creator of PowerBuilder and now driving web services at Novell).

I'll leave reporting on the content to JavaPro, but for me each year the fact that a competitive round-table is even possible is a cause for celebration and a mark of the success of Java. Within the community we naturally focus on our concerns and issues but seeing a room filled with high-energy companies like Borland, Novell, BEA, Motorola and Sun always reminds me that the openness of the Java community is a remarkable thing.

Java - to Mars and beyond!

Dinner last night was an excellent opportunity to meet Ronald Mak, a researcher at NASA Ames who is respoonsible for the middleware powering the information feeds used by Mars Probe scientists. You may remember seeing the way NASA was using Java at past JavaOne conferences, but it's really come a long way since then. Mars Probe scientists and engineers have a powerful Java client application called CIP (Collaborative Information Portal) that displays images, data, schedules, reports and the rest of the information needed to run the Mars Exploration Rover (MER).

Ronald told me that the diversity of the client environments - Windows, Mac, Unix (including Solaris and Linux) and more - means Java is the only way they could even imagine providing CIP to the MER team. His personal responsibility is the web application server that powers CIP, and he's used all the power of J2EE (including the new Web services support) to make it happen. Java is also in wide use in the R & D areas at Ames, including modelling and simulation.

So when the weather finally allows it, MER will be one of the most exciting Java input devices around. I wish them luck with their mission!

Update:It launched!

Anticipation

I'm now in a cold & grey San Francisco and my hotel room overlooks Moscone Convention Center. The new Java logo is scattered all over the buildings and billboards, and there are people everywhere building stands and making preparations for the influx. Last night I sat in on preparations for Rich Green's keynote on Wednesday, and there's some cool stuff in there...

I have been to all of the US JavaOne conferences (I went to the first few representing IBM), have spoken at a many of them in one capacity or another, and I remain convinced that this is a unique event in the realm of technology conferences. The energy, the buzz in the place, the unexpected fusion of geek and culture, the venue, all contribute to create a spirit and presence that I don't find at any other event.

Even so, a lot has changed, even since last year. The blogging, for example. I'll be fascinated to see how many people are blogging the conference this year - please leave a comment with a pointer to your blog if you are. The rise of the blog has its critics of course, and there's a range of quality stretching from the banal through the abusive to the excellent, but in a context like JavaOne where the community is everything I am expecting quality and insight to flow. So, your links please!

Webmink About Town

I've been blogging for 18 months or so over on my personal page so it's a delight to finally be able to write under the java.net banner. Starting at JavaOne 2003 in San Francisco I'll comment on trends, oddities, gadgets and whatever else catches my eye as I travel. I'll cross-post anything relevant from my personal blog but if you want to read about my politics, musical taste etc you'll need to read that blog too :-)

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