Nirmalya’s Blog

This year’s JavaOne conference was held in San Francisco, from June 27-30. This is the 10th year, that this conference is being held. 2005 is also Java’s 10th Birthday! Happy 10th Birthday Java! Goes to prove the worldwide accepatance/domiance of a superior programming language! Yay!

Over 11000 people attended this year’s JavaOne conference. Large number, but still smaller than the 20000+ attendees who attended JavaOne 1999.

Everywhere you went in and around San Francisco’s Moscone area one can see JavaOne attendees thronging the place carrying this year’s JavaOne backpack. From far they gave me the impression of being sturdy laptop backpacks, but they didn’t turn out to be so.

The last 4 days have been a mad rush, but a great experience. Keynote sessions started at around 9 in the morning, the BOFs (Birds of a Feather sessions) started from 11am, and ran all day, with the technical sessions starting in the afternoon and ran until late at night, 1120 pm to be precise. If you’re really keen (like most of use attending were), then it meant no breaks at all. There were 15 minutes in between sessions, but you had rush to the next session, as there were almost always long queues outside the halls (especially for the popular ones). Lunch, which ran from 11 till 1, was a massive affair, with seating for nearly 3000 attendees to eat their lunch simultaneously. Wasn’t really good food, just a variety of salads, some cold turkey/chicken and some drinks.

We all carried contact-less JavaCards (made by Oberthur) as part of the conference badge. I should’ve guessed that all our movements were being tracked (and for good reason). The photo on the right is of a slide presented during this morning’s general session. Some very eager attendees managed to be at 6 different sessions at the same time! Some even walked as much as 3.27 miles in between sessions! Hmm.. I wonder if SUN have a deal with all companies (sending their employees to this year’s JavaOne) to keep an eye on them whilst they are here.

Several companies had their booths in the Pavillion area. The likes of JBoss, BEA, SUN, HP, The Eclipse Foundation, Parasoft, Axalto, etc.. Even Google was there, to hire new engineers. The only odd one out was Microsoft, shying away at one remote corner of the pavillion! How dare they spoil the holiness of everything Java! Besides giving away free DVDs of beta versions of Visual Studio 2005, I really can’t quite figure the reasoning for them being here.

This morning’s general session was quite fun. There was a display of a Java-powered unmanned aircraft! It is currently being developed by Boeing. They claimed this aircraft to be capable of flying 12-14 hours non-stop, using just 4 gallons of fuel! It wasn’t possible to fly this aircraftin the convention hall, so they showed a video instead. Currently, this aircraft is being used to fly to spot shoals of fish, for game fishermen.

Then there were the results of the T-shirt throwing contest, the one of the left won this year. The Flying Dukes Contestants were rated by an Applause-O-Meter, based on the 3 criteria, [1] Use Of Java Technology, [2] Creativity & [3] Geek factor.

Here are some photos from this year’s JavaOne.