Or rather, for me, day 1.

I spent an interesting and pleasurable day at Javapolis: you’ve got to be impressed at the quality of the organisation, the European scope of the event, and the comfortable settings (Metropolis in Antwerp: cushy seats and large cinema screens for all presentations).

My schedule of today:

• Late for the keynote. James Gosling talking about pretty much under the Sun (pun intended), J2SE, J2ME, EE, JavaFX and all those other acronyms that make the java world mysterious and befuddling to the outsider.
  You get why Sun likes Gosling for a spokesman. He’s relaxed, and he has this benevolent Santa Claus quality about him, while being quite witty and (obviously) clued up. Most memorable quote:

  Netbeans 6 is almost as good as sex

  . Which could be interpreted as an allusion to the quality of his sex life, or to the level of his enjoyment of this IDE, depending.

• OpenJDK: this was not really a technical presentation, but still quite interesting: Mark Reinhold talked about the process of open sourcing the JDK.
  This meant combing the code for external sources, working out legal aspects, migrating to another versioning system, and setting up a governance board. From the cathedral to the bazaar.
• Filthy Makeover: of very little practical interest to me, since i don’t code rich clients very often. The few AWT and Swing apps i’ve made didn’t leave me with a great impression of the stuff.
  However, this presentation showed that they’ve moved some way, and that you can now make nice-looking applications, with animations, transparency effects, and similar candy. And the presenter (Chet Haas) had esthetically pleasing features, which always helps.
• JBoss SOA: this turned out to be more a presentation about SOA then about the JBOSS framework. Pretty impartial, and well presented (Mark Little)
• JRuby by Ola Bini and Charles Nutter: i’ll make a post about that one alone, otherwise this post will exceed my personal limit (not to mention your attention span). This was the presentation i was looking forward to most.
• The day was ended by a panel discussion between James Gosling, Neal Gafter (Google), Joshua Bloch (= design guru, also Google), Martin Odersky. A bit aimless, but quite fun nonetheless. Not much debating going on, except for the time when Joshua Bloch dared suggesting that Java might have a limited future, while James Gosling was keen to demonstrate that it was alive and kicking.
• At that last presentation, i was sitting next to Jim Weaver. We got talking, and he offered me and my colleague a free Java FX (e)book ! It would be impolite not read it and drop a review on Amazon, as he asked. Nice man.
Pfew. Long day, long post. Let’s see if i can keep this up.

Update: i forgot: bumped into Bruno Lowagie who was there for a book-signing. He got congratulated by Gosling himself for iText – impressive, if i say so myself.

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