Time flies! It’s been already a full year since I attended JavaOne 2006 and here I am again in San Francisco, for my yearly technical pilgrimage: JavaOne 2007. The weather is exceptionally beautiful in The Foggy City, with temperatures reaching 30 degrees and I think this is very unusual for this time of the year. The rest of the week is supposed to be cooler but at least sunny.
Under a blue sky and a scorching sun I went to register today. Needless to say, the registration desk was very busy and I had to queue up to register and to collect the seminar material. This year’s JavaOne bag looks nice but it seems that Sun went for some cost-cutting measures because I couldn’t find the usual JavaOne notebook in the bag. Neither the session schedule book was there. But thankfully 
they didn’t forget the t-shirt and the pen.
Thinking about what happened since JavaOne 2006, I remember that last year, the biggest topic of conversation was whether Java will be open-sourced or not. I must admit that it didn’t change our lives (maybe not yet) but it’s happened.
Last year, AJAX was the hottest technology and I’m expecting it to be the same this year. There are going to be mile-long queues for any session having AJAX in their title :). Mind you, I’m going to attend one or two sessions on AJAX but I came prepared. I brought my runners. I’m going to beat my 400m record from one room to the other, hoping to find a free seat before the tsunami of AJAX fanatics hits.
Also, I wonder what other concept or technology will receive the “2.0″ label as part of a marketing strategy (Like Oracle’s “SOA 2.0″ announcement in JavaOne 2006). Is there going to be a “3.0″ version of the Web this year? Maybe not in this conference because we don’t know about it yet but probably O’Reilly trade-marked all the terms from Web 3.0 to Web 18.0 so we cannot even mention the future releases of Web. We’re all going to have to wait until O’Reilly and his friends decide to ship the new version so that we can peacefully download it and use it. Rumor has it, Web 3.0 is so interactive that it gives a shoulder massage to the user while surfing and it prepares the coffee.
In my opinion, another topic that’s going to attract a lot of attention this year is the scripting technologies. Given the fact that Java SE 6 is gaining acceptance with its scripting support and that Ruby, Groovy, JRuby etc. are becoming more and more popular, I’m sure people will be interested in knowing more about scripting in this year’s sessions.
Last but not least, looking at my schedule, one thing that I’m really going to appreciate this year is the time slot allocated for lunch. Previous years one had to miss sessions if he/she wanted to eat. This year, it looks like we will be able to take our time to have some lunch. Great thinking! We can’t run only with coffee you know!
Technorati Tags: JavaOne 2006, JavaOne 2007, JavaOne, AJAX, Web 3.0, Java SE 6, scripting, Ruby, Groovy, JRuby
