Blog

Wow. What an exciting day. Time sure flew by. It all started with great weather and
an awesome flight on the seaplane from downtown Victoria to downtown Vancouver. After
all Victoria is only the capital of BC and Vancouver is the big city with all the busy
developers, so thats where the developer day got to be ;-)

Once at the venue I checked out my badge and got some tucker and vitalising liquid(coffee!!) and
had some Java related nerdy conversations with other members of the audience. Starting off
the official presentations was a quick hello from Brent Gushulak handing over to the very
energetic Sang Shin as the days MC and one of the presenters.
Warming up the audience to a good applause he handed off to
James Gosling.

The father of Java delivered a fun marketing speech for Java full of interesting
bits of information e.g. the brasilian healthcare system, mobile phone technologies, real
time Java work (JSR 1!!!), the programming
teaching tool BlueJ that is being integrated with
NetBeans, the move to multi core, multi threaded development
(no more free ride for developers) and more.

Moving on we got four quick tech demos from a panel of speakers. We got to see the impressive
3D GUI of Project Looking Glass,
powerful debugging with
NetBeans Profiler,
an iTunes compatible MP3 player rapid development with NetBeans and
a mobile phone application showing off the power of the
NetBeans Mobility Pack. Lots of beans
around here.. anyway. Oh and by the way – showing the advantages of a vector format (SVG) in
terms of scaling to different resolutions as if that got anything to do with Java is at least
misleading for the less informed.

Next up was Alex with an overview of software news from Sun including some numbers to impress us and
announcements of mobile.java.com and
games.dev.java.net.

This lead to the break out into two separate tracks. I started off in the AJAX code camp, but got
bored by the basic rambling (what is web2.0, what is ajax…) and moved over to to the more
interesting presentation about Mustang (Java SE 6),
Glassfish (JEE 5), JavaDB and java.net in general.
Rags did a great job entertaining and educating us.
I still got to hazzle him about stupid restrictions in JavaDB (aka Apache Derby)
and the miserable state of the Sun JDK on Linux. Can anybody tell me why there is no debian, ubuntu, fedora, suse,
gentoo and so on package maintained by Sun? What about all the help to the community? Surely it can’t be too hard to employ some Linux
gurus that can maintain a few packages. Imagine what that would do to Java software on Linux. And maybe
get it sorted before Mono takes off even more and overtakes Java on Linux. Sorry.. I will stop ranting now. Back to the day’s proceedings.

I went back to the AJAX demo afterwards and got pleasantly surprised with a JSF, Google maps hack similar to
this. After lunch I checked out Rags presentation about WebServices. Well worth listening. Even better was the presentation about EJB 3 from Sang afterwards. Lets
just say I got very motivated to go and play around with all the goodies. Rounding off I went to the long,
but very informative presentation about Security again done by Rags.

After it was all over I got to chat with some people from Sun and VanJUG before I had to head back to catch my flight home.
Summarizing here are my take aways.

Did I have a good day?

Absolutely.

Did I learn something new?

Yeah, not just a bit.

Did I get motivated to try out some of the new technologies?

You bet.

Will I come again next time?

There is no stopping me.

See you then,

manfred

PS: All the presentations are on Sang Shin’s site if you are interested.