JavaOne 2011 Thursday and wrap-up
Opinions expressed in the post are solely my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
Thursday started with the Community Keynote. Well, it actually started with a 25 minutes IBM presentation about their cloud story. This had obviously nothing to do with the topic of the event and later speakers pointed this out rather frankly. At least it was interesting to hear that there is a job title like “Cloud Architect”.
The real part of the Community Keynote started with a quiet moment to honor Steve Jobs.
Later on, various winners of the Duke choice award and JUG luminaries cared for a lighter mood again, presented their work and asked the audience for participation in their local JUGs and in the advancement of Java via the OpendJDK. The JavaPosse appeared on stage and presented a funny show.
It was also announced that many of the JavaOne talks will be available on parleys.com, which provide by far the best experience when it comes to viewing live-captured talks.
Afterwards I attended the ZeroTurnaround (JRebel) talk on classloader issues. The rather big room (~300 ppl) was packed and left the impression that many Java developers share a common pain around classloaders. It was a good talk, covering the basics and typical pifalls. The only surprise for me was *how* easily you can end up with a classloader leak.
In order to improve my fathering skills, I went into Ken Sipe’s talk on “Rocking the Gradle”, where I met Adam Bien. Ken is a great presenter. However, convincing the crowd is a challenge especially as many Maven users seem to suffer from the Stockholm syndrome.
Then onto “Visualization of Geomaps and Topic Maps with JavaFX 2.0″, which had some interesting visuals captured here.
For me JavaOne 2011 finished with Jim Clarke and Dean Iverson on GroovyFX, where they made some really good points suggesting that Groovy is the best language to drive the JavaFX 2.0 API.
As a side note, James Weaver introduced me to Jim Clarke by pointing out “He is from *Canoo*”. Then the discussion went into how well-known Canoo is in the community and that all employees must be true geniuses to achieve so much with so few people 
Fazit: Still, JavaOne is nowhere near where it was before the Oracle acquisition both in terms of size and in terms of being an unparalleled community experience. Distribution all over various hotels just doesn’t feel right. However, meeting friends has been and still remains the most important part of JavaOne and the conference still delivers on that account.
Important topics were new Java versions, JavaEE (+cloud), and Java for the Desktop with 50+ talks on JavaFX. Whenever the audience was asked about which alternative languages they use, Groovy was the clear winner. It appears that in the mainstream, Groovy has become the default choice for dynamic programming on the JVM.
The topic of concurrent programming was in my eyes underrepresented. Guillaume and myself had simple usage of GPars in our demos but for such a big and increasingly important topic the coverage should be much more extensive.
Finally, some visual impressions.
Good-bye SF
Dierk Koenig
