We flew in on friday and spent the weekend in San Francisco. One thing that became obvious very quickly is that the recession has hit this economy hard. Big stores, like the Virgin Megastore, CompUSA, Disney Store and the Sony Centre: gone! The NL-JUG get together on sunday underlined that. The group, last year about 120 people big, now was a much more manageable size (about 30 in total). We all enjoyed the wine tour and dinner though!

Just as I expected, general attendance at JavaOne was dramatically low. Where one had to check in on sunday or monday on previous years to avoid long lines on the morning of the keynote, I could walk up to a counter directly, sign up, collect my goodies elsewhere and be in the keynote room only a minute or so later. It’s a funny feeling when compared to other years. It all went so quick I almost missed a big sign of Hans that was put up outside the Moscone center. Appearantly, he symbolizes the Java community!

With Oracle still in the process of buying Sun, I couldn’t help but feel that there was less news to announce than normal. The opening keynote certainly was pretty boring, partner after partner announcing how great their relation with Java and Sun is. At the end, Larry Ellison did appear on stage, together with Scott McNeally and Jonathan Schwartz. Not sure if it was bad rehearsal or a total lack of chemistry, but it came across a bit awkward. The other keynotes were no better, the exception being the final one by James Gosling, who did manage to show quite a few cool projects.

Appstores were definitely a big theme during the conference. If you did not have one yourself yet, you were definitely not cool. I signed up for the Sun one, but I don’t think it will become a big success. There are not that many killer desktop apps around in Java, especially not ones I would want to pay for. But then again, I never got the whole ringtones market either, and that’s huge.

A couple of highlights of the rest of JavaOne:

• Rich Hickey, author of Clojure, stating that mutable stateful objects are the new spaghetti code, dismissing Java and object oriented languages in general in a future where concurrency and parallelism are more and more present.
• At zembly.com they have tools to search for web service APIs and test them. If plugged into an IDE you can even drag and drop them into a source file and get a snippet generated automatically.
  – After a talk about Filthy Rich Clients at earlier conferences, Guy and Haase did a talk about applying the 12 Disney animation principles to user interfaces. Interesting concept, but they should have spent more time coming up with good examples. Also, two or three bad jokes per presentation are enough guys!
• Don Brown showed the new Atlassian plugin framework, and gave a good overview of some of the pitfalls of using OSGi. The plugin framework can be dropped in arbitrary applications, and he demonstrated that live on stage.
• Glassfish V3 was demo’d at one of the keynotes, running on Apache Felix, and launching in less than 2 seconds, showing almost instant develop/compile/run cycles by updating bundles automatically from within an IDE.
• Runescape, a massively online multiplayer game, designed to run on stone-age hardware. What impressed me most was the fact they created their whole 3D authoring environment themselves, instead of relying on industry standards like Lightwave or 3D Studio, claiming to work a lot quicker that way.

Want to know more? Come and visit us in Arnhem for the JavaOne Reloaded event. For more information, see a previous blog entry.