Welcome back for Day 2 of the 2008 JavaOne conference. Hard to believe it's already Wednesday, isn't it? Yeah, JavaOne is one of those conferences that ends before you know it. It's kind of like my JetBlue flight out here from Austin, Texas. You get so wrapped up in the content that's on the television screen in front of your seat, that you find yourself bribing the pilot to keep circling over the airport until the show you're watching ends. (Didn't work, by the way.)
Today's opening general session had plenty of excitement, and I'm not just talking about the T-shirt that Gosling nearly hit me on the head with. There is some great work coming from the JavaFX compiler group, even though the network choked off some of the live demos on stage. (I saw the demos working before the Conference -- really!)
And what's also really nice to see -- and this comes from a person who started programming with Applesoft BASIC -- is that the compiler group is taking the time to get the little details of the language right. I've said it many times: that bind keyword is just a killer feature, but you'd be surprised how much debate went on over the past couple of months to make sure that the most minute aspects of its behavior work properly. In other words, the wait for JavaFX technology will be worth it, as it sort of follows that "Principle of No Surprises" that you hear about in other languages.
If today is your first day at the Conference, you should know that there are now plenty of events that happen before the opening general session on Tuesday. So if you just arrived on Monday evening, you may have missed some really great aspects of the JavaOne conference.
Monday was CommunityOne, the free and open-source developer conference, with people like Ian Murdock, formerly of Debian Linux; Sun VP Rich Green; and Mårten Mickos, formerly from MySQL and now from Sun. This year, we had a bunch of cool topics in CommunityOne: panels on Python and Ruby, a whole track on the brand-new NetBeans IDE 6.1, parallel programming for you multicore people, JavaFX technology for those of you in the client space, and the ever-popular Startup Camp, where over 500 people came to exchange ideas for new Web 2.0 ventures. If you missed it, be sure to get here a few days early next year and network with the groundbreakers of tomorrow.
By the way, while I was typing this on Tuesday morning, I noticed that my personal Conference schedule was delivered to me by email from the Schedule Builder tool. I don't recall this happening last year, so kudos to the Conference group for this new feature. You see, typically what happens after the opening general session is that I have to rush to the press room to submit things like the Daily Prompt, email them to the production team for copyediting -- you didn't seriously expect something that looks this nice to come out of me without some serious hammering, right? -- and approval before the print deadline, and then sit in a stupor and try to figure out where I have to go next.
By the time I get to the first session, I'm usually leaning against the back wall rubbing my sore ankles, so an automatically emailed schedule will help keep the ibuprofen count in my bag constant.
Anyway, if you're like me and you need to come up with creative excuses like this one for your selective amnesia, just check your email to see the sessions you've signed up for. It's pretty hard to miss, especially since I have three copies in my inbox now.
And with that, enjoy your Wednesday, and we'll see you right back here tomorrow for Day 3.
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