Since I'm back to work from my JavaONE "vacations" :-), I'm constantly asked whether it was worth to attend to JavaONE, or not. Actually it is impossible to answer the question in general - the answer is highly dependent on your motivation. In case you are constantly reading blogs, JSR-specs and books, the majority of the technical sessions will appear as "common sense" to you. However, I choose some topics, in which I'm less interested in general - and learn so a lot. The technical session are more formal and "unidirectional", however BOFs are really great. I had the chance to discuss some clustering techniques with openMQ, Glassfish engineers and discuss new features in the EJB 3.1 spec. Even at the day "zero", the "Glassfish Unconference" was less spectacular, but you could directly ask specific questions to engineers and discuss issues and future directions.

However, if you expect to learn bleeding edge technologies in the General Sessions / keynotes, you will be probably get disappointed - it's better just to enjoy them. E.g. the announcement of Java FX wasn't a huge story, but the Ken Russel's presentation ("dragging out applets") in the first technical session just afterwards really was.

For me JavaONE is the unique opportunity to associate an email-address with a face, as well :-).

JavaONE is known for the parties as well - however they are mostly parallel to the BOFs. Even the After Dark concert was concurrent to some BOFs.  So having fun, or learning a lot - it is your decision, however in both cases: Sleeping will be optional.

From my perspective: it was worth - it is actually the one and only conference which I fully (the whole week) attend. See you hopefully at JavaONE 2009!

JavaONE 2008 is definetely over :-(. It was inspiring again. I had the chance to talk to many Sun engineers and exchange ideas, experiences and thoughts during breakfeasts and lunch (compatible with John Gage's idea :-)). I especially enjoyed the BOFs - they went sometimes deeply into the technology and ended in openspace-like fashion. However - after JavaONE you will need vacations - it starts at 8.30 AM - and ends about 11 PM - sleeping is really optional. I even sacrificied the After Dark party this year...

However my flight took about 13h - which is long and borring. As every year I spent the whole time working or writing articles etc. It is always amazing how much you can achieve during this time and how fast 13h actually are. This year, during the flight to J1, I prepared the slides for my lightning talks, short talks and wrote demos for my actuall RIA-talk. Beyond that I read about 200 pages / articles of various Java-Books.

On the way back I wrote whole article about Domain Driven Design with EJB 3 and JPA 1.0 for JavaSPEKTRUM (in German). During the process of writing I recognized that my sample was far less fluent, than actually expected and refactored the whole domain layer (http://p4j5.dev.java.net - RunAndBike).  I had the opportunity to charge my notebook in frankfurt, and spent the last hour to munich with the refactoring of the underworld.dev.java.net communication layer.

It seem like without internet, in a boring place you can get really productive. However, you don't have necessary to fly - something like Alcatraz should work as well. No internet, no distraction and no way out. Is this the end of the "Google's Nice Work Place" era? :-)

During some technical sessions at JavaONE speakers presented some code or demos. I was just curious, which IDEs they used. My observation was:

• in desktop related tracks mostly intelliJ was used. The exception from the rule was the Netbeans RCP vs. Eclise RCP session, were Netbeans and Eclipse were used :-).
• in the serverside related sessions mostly Netbeans, sometimes intelliJ were used

At general sessions / keynotes Netbeans was used almost exclusively for some reason :-). In my talk I used Netbeans 6.1 as well - I needed an IDE with visual designer for Swing, as well as JSF.

It is hard to say, whether intelliJ, or Netbeans was actually the most used - however I never saw Eclipse in action on stage (except in the Netbeans vs. Eclipse talk).

JavaONE 2008 is over - but I'm already looking forward to the Jazoon conference - I will discuss my experiences with Glassfish in production.

Java FX wasn't that great news. Netbeans 6.0 plugin was already available for ages (at least months) - so you could play with it. However there were some interesting strategic movements announced at the JavaONE 2008:

• Java FX will come with a video and audio codecs from on2 - the demo was really impressive. This makes Java interesting for video / audio streaming
• Appets can be dragged outside the browser and installed as WebStart - this is really great idea and very useful
• Java FX will come with some instrumentation which will allow the monitoring of user behavior in all layers (I'm already curious, how it is will be implemented :-)) - something like "Business JMX"
• The integration with Scenegraph and JWebPane (Swing compatible WebKit implementation) is really exciting and opens new opportunities...
• JDK 16.u10 was already available - however it could complement the package
  

...and the Top Selling books at JavaONE (Wednesday) are:  

1. Effective Java 2nd Ed. (Addison Wesley)
2. Java Puzzlers (Addison Wesley)
3. Pro NetBeans IDE 6 (Apress)
4. Filthy Rich Clients (Addison Wesley)
5. Practical JRuby on Rails (Apress)
6. Groovy in Action (Manning)
7. GWT in Action (Manning)
8. Facebook Application Development (WROX)
9. Secrets of Rockstar Programmers (McGraw Hill)
10. Practical REST on Rails 2 (Apress)

During the General Session at JavaONE a fully functional 3D application with (3D)-sound support was presented. The interesting thing is: it ran on a cell phone with a NVidia graphic card usind OpenGL.

The openGL binding was migrated from desktop to Java ME - it ran smoothly. If you like to start with OpenGL - there is a OpenGL Pack for Netbeans freely available for download. It is already one of the most popular Netbeans extensions. It comes already with samples and full documentation.

...and the Top Selling books at JavaONE are:

1. Effective Java 2nd Ed. (Addison Wesley)
2. Pro NetBeans IDE 6: RCP (Apress)
3. Groovy in Action (Manning Publishing)
4. Filthy Rich Clients (Addison Wesley)
5. Java Puzzlers (Addison Wesley)
6. Definitive Guide to Grails (Apress)
7. Java CAPS Basics (Prentice Hall)
8. JavaFX Script (Apress)
9. Secrets of Rockstar Programmers (McGraw Hill)
10. Art of Multiprocessor Programming (Elsevier)

Glassfish v3 TP2 supports already some EJB 3.1 features (spec is not finalized yet) - and it is embeddable. Check this post for details. This opens some new interesting opportunities and use cases. An obvious one is unit testing, another one ...the direct usage inside of RIAs (Eclipse / Netbeans RCP) - I will present some more ideas in detail during my session at Friday (JavaONE).

During a meeting in the Community Corner (java.net booth) with James Gosling, a participant asked an interesting question: "Which Programming Language would you use *now* on top of JVM, except Java?". The answer was surprisingly fast and very clear: - Scala.

Btw. I will give tomorrow two talks in the community corner one about GreenFire (heating system on Glassfish / Java EE 5 - which saves energy), the another one about underworld  (Java EE 5 / Glassfish backend for virtual reality). So see you if you like!

I tried to register to the early JavaFX SDK program and found (surprisingly) a link to my session: "Java™ SE 6 and Java EE 6 Platform the Operating System for Interactive RIAs, TS-4864, at Friday 05/09/2008 1:30 PM-2:30 PM, in Esplanade 305". ...it was marked as "hot" (just go to www.javafx.com and click on "Friday") - I'm already looking forward to it. Funny enough: this session got the same slot, as my session last year with similar title (see feedback / class evaluation). However, I will go more into detail with some demos (I got several emails with this request).

Warning: The focus is not visual stuff (effects, animations), but structure, best practices and design of complete, efficient but still maintainable applications. I'm going especially to cover the boundary between the presentation and business tier and cover Data Binding, Stateless vs. Stateful, Model View Presenter (Passive View and Supervising Controller) and Hybrid Components. I will cover the impact of JavaFX Script to the maintainability and best practices as well.

For the demos I will use "commodity" Netbeans 6.1 (Java EE) with Glassfish v2ur2. I will show Swing and JSF demos as well. So -> see you at Friday.