Time flies… I have the impression that I said the same thing last year but here I am again in San Francisco for this year’s JavaOne: JavaOne 2009.
As usual, the trip to San Francisco was very long. The 4-hour delay in London Heathrow Airport made in unbearable. From home to the hotel, I know it’s hard to believe, it took 22 hours. Not bad, isn’t it?
Anyway, enough complaining. I’m glad that I’m here to attend JavaOne 2009, the biggest Java event and one of the biggest IT conferences in the world.
About this year’s JavaOne, there were rumors that the numbers would be low compared to the previous years because of the global recession. At first glace, during the registration and the CommunityOne events, I thought that the rumors were true. Furtermore, the fact that Sun continued the “Early Bird” discount until the first day of JavaOne shows that the organizers are not impressed by the total number attandees either. However, it’s hard to be sure about it before the first general session that’s going to take place tomorrow morning.
After the registration, when I was handed my attendee pack, I was surprised not to see a notepad and a pen in it. However, there was a new item: Antibacterial hand gel. It looked like the pen & notepad bugdet was spent on killing germs. Or do they think that this year’s sessions are not worth taking notes of? I cannot be the only one using pen & paper to take notes, can I? A quick trip to the Office Depot solved that problem in exchange for a few bucks. However it was annoying not to have these basic tools after paying so much to attend.
This year, I’m planning to attend sessions mainly about Mobile development and Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is this year’s most popular subject. It’s all over the place, especially with the Sun Cloud.
Following the tradition, today saw CommunityOne events in the Moscone Center. David Douglas, Senior VP of Cloud Computing and Chief Sustainability Officer at Sun, opened the CommunityOne General Session. He started by emphasizing the importance of openness, such as in Open-Source, open API, open ideas, etc. He, then, talked about the idea of “Citizen Engineer“, a concept developed in the upcoming book called Citizen Engineer that Douglas co-authored himself. When he was talking about open communities, he said that there are student communities that are part of the open communities. Douglas mentioned that there are more than 600 students attending JavaOne this year. Later he was joined by 4 student ambassadors from all around the world to talk about the technical student activities that they’ve organized around various international communities.
In the second part of the session, Douglas invited Lew Tucker, Sun Cloud CTO, to talk about Cloud Computing and the Sun Cloud. From Sun’s standpoint, Open-Source is the foundation of Cloud Computing. Tucker showed a quick demo of how to graphically create a Sun Cloud topology by dragging & dropping available resources (from their templates) on a blank canvas. It looked really interesting. Another demo was about a product called Moonwalk. It is an enterprise data management technology used for storage optimization, replication, migration and disaster recovery using the Sun Cloud. The second demo was on Vertica, a column-oriented database deployed and working on the Sun Cloud. And the last one was about Webapp VM. It is a special VM running on the Sun Cloud used to deploy and manage Web applications.
All in all, today was a good introductory warm-up day but tomorrow is going to be very busy.
Lastly, I’m hearing that I’m missing the Irish summer while I’m here. So typical! The weather hadn’t been great until I left. Now, it looks like every day is very sunny and warm. I’m sure it’ll go back to the way it was as soon as I set foot in the country. So, enjoy it while you can guys! I’ll be back in a few days :).
- Yagiz -
Technorati Tags: JavaOne, JavaOne 2009, CommunityOne, Cloud Computing, Sun Cloud
How many people attended JavaOne this year?