Day 4: Drat! It's Already Over!

By Robert Eckstein

Well, in the blink of an eye, it's now the final day of the 2006 JavaOne conference. Lots of great presentations, a wealth of information, and enough late-night parties to keep my ears ringing for at least a few weeks.

First, I did manage to get my hands on one of those $199 Jasper S20 SavaJe phones that I talked about yesterday. Really cool. For those of you who didn't the see the General Session presentation, this phone implements the JSR 209 specification, Advanced Graphics and User Interface Optional Package for the J2ME Platform. In other words, think Swing, parts of AWT, and the ImageIO libraries on a handheld mobile platform. If you can't find one at the Conference -- and it's certainly possible that they have sold out by now -- you can still order them one at the SavaJe web site You can get the developer kit from there as well.

I was a little late arriving at the Thursday General Session, but I loved the content that Erich Gamma and John Wiegand of IBM presented. You see, I've been on many development teams, and all of them have death marched down the "long rope" that the speaker mentioned. We started to get pretty depressed as the bugs mounted and the testing halted three-quarters of the way through a year-long development cycle. Would this project ever end? In addition, I liked Gamma and Wiegand's term the "broken-window house" -- what happens if you let too many bugs linger for too long. Maybe it's the perfectionist side of me, or maybe I've been burned one too many times with software that a company released too early, but it's nice to see a systemic process for tackling that.

Did you attend the Sun Developer Network (SDN) party at the Metreon on Wednesday night? I met several key people in the Java technology and NetBeans IDE world, and as I was walking out the door, I believe I saw Sun senior vice president Jeff Jackson leading a conga line. If you didn't get an invitation, then you need to join the SDN, which is a good idea anyway. It's free, and doing so will keep yours truly happily employed writing technical content for years to come. See http://developers.sun.com/ for more details.

You may be wondering how many emails I've received since John Gage mentioned my name in the opening General Session and told the audience to contact me if they had any concerns. 1000? 500? Nope. Only 32 so far. Yeah, I was pretty surprised as well. I donned my titanium-reinforced, Kevlar-coated vest before I hit the Get Messages button on my browser on Tuesday night, waiting for my laptop to start spitting fire. However, the best thing about the responses I received was that almost every mail I received was very cordial. That speaks well for all of our attendees, so let me thank each and every one of you right now. And if you did send me an email with concerns, rest assured that I forwarded those on to the Conference organizers. Your voice was not ignored.

Did you like that little fold-up pocket guide this year that had all the talks on it? One of the people you should thank for that is also one of the presenters of a spectacular talk on Tuesday afternoon entitled "Filthy Rich Clients: Animated Effects in Swing Applications" (TS-1297): Chet Haase. Chet's one of our Desktop superheroes at Sun, and his session was, as usual, excellent. Want to know how to make your Swing applications animate better and look more Mac-like? This talk was filled with a ton of good information. Be sure to check out the slides online if you missed it. It's a safe bet that you'll see the sequel at next year's JavaOne conference.

By the way, I had a chance to talk briefly with Eric Harshbarger of Sun, who is a developer with a truly unique talent: He builds Lego mosaics. If you want to see his latest creation, a 10,000-piece mosaic, you can find him in the back area of the JavaOne Pavilion. He even has a small program that allows him to translate an image into a Lego mosaic and tells him exactly how many pieces of a certain color he needs. I love Legos, I love Mindstorms, and here's yet another innovative application of those modular toys we all loved as kids.

Finally, at some point during the Conference, I usually end up exercising my poetic muscles with an ode to Duke. So here is my ode for the 2006 JavaOne conference.

Ode to Duke
Oh, thank you James... er, I mean Duke,
Over a decade you've been here now,
And we all know it's no fluke,
That you've given us several cash cows.

You're there in the keynotes,
You walk through the halls,
And if there's ever a quake,
I hope you're there to break my fall.

Oh, Duke, you did a bicycle kick,
With a ball from straight up,
Which proves you can take a lick,
And you're ready for World Cup.

But I was scared when I saw,
At an angle above your head,
An industrial-strength chainsaw,
"Power Tools for Power Geeks," it said.

And so I shouted, "Please,
Be careful forthwith.
And whatever you do, don't sneeze
What a mess we'd end up with!"

You see, my point with this ode
As everyone knows, is that
We can't continue to code,
If we can't find your nose.

We'll see you here at Moscone Center next May for the 2007 JavaOne conference. Thanks for attending!