Just Two More Days!

Welcome to Day 3 of the 2009 JavaOne conference. Yes, you're over halfway through the Conference, and if you haven't needed a foot massage by now, I truly envy you.

Don't get me wrong, I love coming here, but I often do so much walking during the Conference that I feel I have to rip out the soles of my shoes and replace them with those automassaging gel soles. Maybe there's a podiatrist out there who can help me get the proper walking shoes for JavaOne week.

OK, it's time I level with you: I do love mobile stuff. So I wasn't really expecting to have my mind blown with all the cool new technology that I saw in the Wednesday afternoon technical general session with Eric Klein.

I know what you're saying: "You're paid to love that stuff! This is marketing fluff!" Well, sometimes that's true, and I sometimes do have that proverbial gun to my head, but this time I was honestly impressed: I loved the demonstrations of the slick new JavaFX 1.2 features, and I think one of the major hits of the session was the introduction of a developer phone that works with JavaFX technology.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of enterprise, and the knowledge that I may be covering much more of it in the near future, I figured I would drop in on a few more enterprise sessions this year. So the first talk that I visited on Tuesday afternoon was SOA Deployment Challenges in the Real World (TS-4476), brought to you by the fine folks at eBay.

If any company out there has had its share of service-oriented framework experience in the past decade, it's the king of auction sites: eBay. What I liked about the presentation is that it discussed real challenges, technical as well as operational, that eBay had in moving to the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model in a large enterprise.

Did you get a chance to visit Java Utopia in the Pavilion? If not, you're missing some neat demos. Although I have a confession: I did spend nearly 20 minutes in front of that Rube Goldberg-ish machine, trying to understand how it was managing so perfectly to sort the marbles into the proper tubes based on color alone. The color sensor was clearly labeled, but after watching the marble fly past the sensor, I kept trying to see the gates switch, and I could only catch them about 30 percent of the time.

The marble-sorting machine sorts marbles by color.

I wish I could also say that I participated in the poker game, but sadly I'm a Sun employee and I'm banned from such games under the official rules. Maybe if I claim that I work for a database company...

JavaOne conference attendees play Texas Hold'em on the Pavilion floor.

Also, after some of the earlier sessions on cloud computing, I'm looking forward to a cloud computing panel discussion on Thursday morning, Show Me the Money, which will feature attendees from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Intuit, and Sun.

This should be fascinating to watch, especially because cloud computing is such a buzzword these days, yet developers are still concerned about the major questions of scalability, reliability, and portability. It seems as if there isn't a rush to create a standard, but instead a rush to create a de facto standard.

Finally, just a small observation that I made while in one of the sessions: You probably noticed that John Gage is not the master of ceremonies of the JavaOne conference anymore, but one thing that he frequently said on Day 1 (and Chris Melissinos echoed) still rings true: Be sure to network while you're here. Share your ideas with your peers, network with movers and shakers -- and as Gage mentioned, "Change the world."

As I wrote last year, you might think that these sort of groundbreaking changes in the world of computing happen only in smoke-filled executive boardrooms. Not so anymore. Some of the most exciting changes could be happening right before your eyes.

With that, enjoy your Thursday, and I'll be back tomorrow for the final day of the 2009 JavaOne conference.

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