Blogging Roller

Still being on east coast time, I couldn't sleep past about 5:30AM this mornning. I headed down to Moscone early to finish planning my JavaOne session schedule. By 8AM, the people started streaming in an the wireless network went to hell in a hurry. I joined the crowd in the main session hall. I guess I have never really been to a big conference because the number of people here, the endless ocean of Java developers, is just overwhelming. Despite that, when I sat down in the hall, I found that I was sitting directly in front of Simon Brown and Sam Dalton.

The opening session was better than I expected because I was expecting marking fluff. The Jonathan Schwartz and the other execs did dish out the fluff and the goofy marketing humor, but it was pretty high-quality and well thought-out fluff. The theme was the ubiquity of Java, with a focus on the non-traditional platforms like smart cards, mobile phones, and automobiles. The message was that, if you want the code that you write to make the most impact, to run on the greatest number of devices, then you've got to be coding to the Java platform. I think they did a good job getting this message accross.

At one point, they started talking about appealing to the Visual Basic type developers and making Java easier to use. They put the word FREE up on the wall in giant letters and they started talking about Java Studio Creator. Turns out, only the 30 day trial is free and on the next slide the word FREE was replaced with $49.95. If you buy a one year subscription to the Sun Developer Network (SDN), then you'll get Creator. During JavaOne you can buy SDN for a special price of $49.95 for one year. I think these prices are fair, but I absolutely hate it when a company proclaims that a product is FREE, but then turns around and tells you that freedom only lasts 30 days. I've heard it a million times, but still, it never fails to piss me off.

Graham Hamilton's Bill Shannon's overview of the J2SE 1.5 Tiger release and Tiger's children was the best part of the morning session. After some markeing inspired goofiness involving a tiny toger cub, he gave a great overview of Tiger. He covered the Shared VM concept, the new look and feels, language ease-of-use features, and annotations. It struck me during this talk, that annotations could make a really major difference in the ways that we develop with Java. Before, we used marker interfaces and method naming patterns (getXXX, setXXX, etc.) to convey information to tools and runtime reflections, but now we'll start using attributes instead. New Java specs will define new attributes and individual Java developers can define new attributes as well. I wasn't planning on attending any of the Tiger talks this week, but Bill changed my mind about that.

That's all for now. I'm about to learn about "Using jvmstat and visualgc to Solve Memory Management Problems."