måndag, maj 12, 2008

JavaOne 2008, the other half

So, the Thursday got a late start. For some strange reason I didn't feel motivated to go see the Intel General Session, so I showed up for Nick's session about JRuby on Rails deployment instead. Nick did a good job of outlining both the problem and the solution, and I have to say that this presentation was a good end cap for the JRuby week at JavaOne.

I had planned to go to some sessions after that, but I ended up hacking on JRuby instead. An interesting parser bug reared its head.

So the next session I went to was the Filthy Rich Clients one. Quite entertaining, although my interest in Swing is not what it used to be.

The final session of the day was the BOF about writing great technology books. This proved highly enjoyable since joining Josh Bloch and Brian Goetz as panelists were Burt Bates and Kathy Sierra. They did a wonderful job talking about how to write books that captures the readers attention and how to correctly use the brains weaknesses against it. I am tempted to say that this was the best session of the whole JavaOne. Brilliant.

On the Friday I was up early and sat in on Goslings Toy Story. Always funny, and some cool things there. For a geek like me, the CERN stuff and jMars was especially cool.

I managed to see quite a lot of sessions during the rest of the day. More Effective Java was useful as always, the Maxine Virtual Machine looks really cool, Neal Ford did an excellent job of comparing JRuby and Groovy, highlighting both the differences and similarities between the two. Finally the Jython session talked about some of the implementation challenges we in the JRuby team have wrestled with too, implementing a highly dynamic language on top of the JVM.

All in all, this JavaOne definitely stood out as the first non-Java-language JavaOne for me. And I didn't even attend a single one of the gazillions of JavaFX presentations. It was a good year in general, and specifically for dynamic languages.

Oh, and my book is the 5th bestseller in the conference bookstore. Yay!

1 kommentar:

Jay Mitchell sa...

Kathy Sierra gave a great keynote at OOPSLA that you might enjoy. It was about "Creating Passionate Users", but sounds similar to the final BOF.

In her keynote she recommended the book, "Understanding Comics." It's a great example of a book "that captures the readers attention" as it explains to them how it is capturing their attention - very meta. ;)

http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/index.php?page=podcasts/

Cheers,
Jay