JavaOne 2009 Is Almost Over!

Welcome back to the fourth and final day of the 2009 JavaOne conference. I hope you've been just as busy as me over the past week learning about some of the cool new stuff that we at Sun have to offer, including JavaFX and the upcoming Sun Cloud. There's plenty out there for even the most seasoned Java developer to learn about.

As with every year, it's been a great week of meeting (and in some cases, re-meeting, and even meeting for a third time) people throughout the conference halls and in the sessions. And best of all, I learned a ton of great new information at each of the many sessions. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: I get paid to say that. But in this case, it's very true. And yes, I still get paid after saying that as well.

Every year, I get to rate the "trinkets" that companies hand out, and this year it was pretty good. Full disclosure: I have a son and a daughter who love it when daddy comes home with a bunch of trinkets, so my award for the coolest toy this year goes to Sprint, for handing out a free Sanyo 700 GPS-enabled cell phone at its booth. I think that my son will be pleasantly surprised by a toy that is thoroughly perplexing to him, but probably won't matter. He'll just assign it a name like "Bluey" or "Nana," and it will become an ultra-modern building in the Hot Wheels empire he's slowly building.

On a personal front, I do have to recommend Safari books. Safari is an online book company started by my former employer, O'Reilly Media, Inc., as well as a few other publishing companies, but I've found it indispensable when it comes to finding proper documentation when I'm doing programming on the road. And it's really cheap. So, if you didn't get a chance to see Safari at the pavilions, be sure to drop by safaribooks.com and take a look at all the technical books that it has for immediate perusal in its library. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Also, I met an old friend who now works at Apress. Apress makes some of the best developer books out there now, so be sure to visit its site for the latest tech books it has to offer.

Also, a trip through the Pavilion wouldn't be complete without playing with the PlayStation 3. Here not only did I get to spend two minutes resting my feet, but (like last year) I still got smashed to pieces at the current game: Rock Band. It just goes to show that coordination, even with a set of four drums, is not one of my strong suits.

By the way, a special thanks to all the people I saw purchasing the JavaFX Mobile Developer Phone from HTC. I know that you'll be thoroughly impressed, especially since you can do near seamless development in NetBeans and then transfer your JavaFX program through the JavaFX Device Manager. I saw a few people in the hallway with it connected to their Dell laptops, tinkering with the FishSim application. It's great to see the interest building after yesterday afternoon's general session.

So, with that, thank you for attending the 2009 JavaOne conference this year in beautiful downtown San Francisco, and best of luck with your future Java programming endeavors!

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