JavaOne 2010 is already history and allow me to make some final remarks. This years’s JavaOne marks the biggest change this conference has ever seen. Replacing the familiar Sun logo by the Oracle logo (well almost – the Audi TT in the Java Frontier demo session still had a Sun sticker on it) was just the least of changes. Java now seems to be just one technology in Oracle’s portfolio and not the pivotal technology as with Sun. It was a pretty sobering experience how the Java community pales next to the Oracle Develop conference. And the fact that the JavaOne sessions were “banned” from the Moscone center where the Oracle Develop conference took place emphasized this even more. Granted, it is far from easy to keep the enthusiasm rolling with a technology that is more than 15 years old. Sun did a far better job on this in the previous years, though.

Whereas the sales part was fairly bad the content is still top-notch. I enjoyed quite many good technical sessions even with the conference venue being a drag (most rooms were not really suited to host a conference session). Spreading the conference across three hotels around Union Square had only one advantage: sessions were only one hour long since people took much longer to move to the next session and hence, speakers were forced to focus more. I also missed the JavaOne slide templates. Sun used to keep a pretty tight leash on how slides looked like. This year, most slides were just alphabet soups.

The major topics of this year’s JavaOne were JavaFX on the client side (despite JavaFX Script’s demise) and the cloud and REST on the server side. I keep wondering whether JavaFX will really conquer the desktop, though. This will be a tough uphill battle, but Oracle tends to be more persistent (or stubborn) than Sun used to be. Having deep pockets certainly helps with this. The prominent absentees were portlets, Java ME, and Google. I haven’t seen a single session about portlets in the conference guide. For Java ME, they offered quite some sessions, but it got barely covered in the keynotes. The mobile world now turns around iOS and Android, JavaME seems to have fallen by the wayside. Last but not least, Google withdrew from the conference at short notice due to the legal battle started by Oracle. I certainly missed them because the Google sessions were always among the best technical sessions at JavaOne.

It was also interesting to see what kind of devices the attendees were using. iPads seem to be very popular with Java developers (despite the fact that the iPad does not run Java!).

My bottom line is that Java as a technology is well entrenched in the developer world and here to stay. I am not so sure about JavaOne. Oracle has quite some homework to do in this area.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 25th, 2010 at 3:02 pm by Bruno and is filed under JavaOne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.