You can tell a conference is successful when its keynote room has its own bathroom. Well, JavaOne certainly doesn't disappoint in that area : 20,000 attendees and steadily growing ever since the first year (only 6,000 then). The conference spans over the two sections of the Moscone Center.
Added to the traditional trade show (more on this below), the tracks (sometimes nine in parallel !), the BOFS and the keynotes, a lot of side occupations are available for those in need of a break : arcade games, TV rooms with comfy seats, miscellaneous contests run though the conference.
In some way, the conference is victim of its own success and the technical material is a little less detailed than it used to be. The right place for the geek at heart is definitely at the BOF sessions, which sometimes run past midnight. Therefore, I will not discuss the tracks I attended. I will rather give personal (and obvisouly biased) impressions on the overall show and how I perceived this event.
Disclaimer : obviously, I haven't been able to attend all the sessions and keynotes, so don't take the following for an exhaustive cover of the conference.
The opening keynote
Tuesday morning, Sun afficionados launched the conference. We saw in succession : John Gage, Alan Baratz, John Kanegaard, Mike Clary and James Gosling. While their message was very well perceived by the crowd (and rightfully so, some of the announcements are indeed important), I found each of them to be less than thrilled by what they were saying. They didn't exactly have that gleam in their eyes, like we used to see from Java advocates in the early days. Most of the announcements and demos were made in a monotone, matter-of-factly way. Supreme irony was reached when Alan said that Sun had "won the war" and that Java would not diverge. He probably didn't know that just a few hours before, Transvirtual had just announced that Kaffe was going to support Microsoft's extensions on their virtual machines.
Even Gosling's appearance was a disappointment. I was really looking forward to listening to him but he didn't seize this opportunity to send his own message. Which is a pity because the crowd was all his. Instead, he asked several guests to come on stage and demo some of their later stuff (nothing actually impressive, not even the Java real-time simulation with two cranes exchanging a peg in).
The fact remains that all the announcements made that morning (and the next days) are a big deal for Sun and their partners, and the message is loud and clear. But I think that what people will actually remember from this year's JavaOne is... elsewhere.
Read on !
Where is the dot in "3Com" ?
3Com is one of the major sponsors of JavaOne 99 but they don't limit themselves to dull billboards displayed on the walls. First of all, they were selling Palm V's for a measly $200 (about half the retail price). This alone was enough to justify a major burst of attention from the geekish crowd roaming the Moscone Center's alleys. Since 3Com only had 10,000 Pilots available (half of the total attendance), they cleverly limited the amount of units sold each day, giving everyone a chance to get one until Friday. But it doesn't stop there.
The Palm V's sold during the conference are preinstalled with an alpha-release of Sun's kjava virtual machine. For those not familiar with the concept (it was officially announced during the conference), kjava is a minimalistic virtual machine. The preinstalled software is a very basic configuration with a limited number of classes (forty-five, among which a subset of lang, net and io), and also some simple software. Once you have your Pilot, all you need to do is go to one of the numerous "sync stations" and update your Pilot with all the latest information : more classes, missing pieces of software and updated information about the conference (rumors, schedules, locations, maps, etc...). All this software fits in 475kb.
You can personalize this information by registering on JavaOne's WebSite and creating your own personalized schedule. Once this is done, a hotsync will upload your agenda on your Pilot. You can now toss the heavy glossy brochure and rely on your faithful Pilot to guide you through the maze. You can take part in the fun too and spread rumors : just type whatever it is you heard, and beam it to other attendees as you meet them over lunch or during a talk.
And this is where the real fun is starting...
The preinstalled software on your Pilot includes a few games. Granted, they're all pretty simplistic. Some of them are complete, others lack vital pieces and most of them can be enhanced by downloading classes written by other attendees (or yourself if you're up to the task). For example, there is a puzzle with missing pieces. You have to add the missing pieces and to do that, you need to beam with other attendees and swap pieces. Once you have completed the puzzle and you guessed what it represents, you are eligible for a prize. This game was extremely popular judging by the number of people I saw busy beaming each other. And it's also a tremendous showcase for the brand new kjava technology.
Definitely a killer, and probably what will strike people's memory for this year's JavaOne (last year was the JavaRing). But the price to pay for Sun is still to be determined.
AppServers are hot
The interest of the community for Enterprise JavaBeans keeps growing, and JavaOne definitely confirms this trend. Most of the EJB-related sessions I attended were booked up despite the size of the rooms, and all the main vendors were present and very active (see below). Sun was also running an "EJB Deployathon". In short, it's an application running on several different platforms and different Application Servers. Note that it's not just a demo : the machines are freely accessible and everyone can play with the application and see for themselves that EJB is far more mature than many analysts pretend.
But then again, this should not be surprising : the term "Application Servers" is extremely broad and allows vendors from all the horizons (ORB, IDE, OODB, RDB, persistence, etc...) to take part in the fray and sell their product as an application server. All of them leverage the EJB 1.0 (not Moscone) spec with various degrees of compatibility.
Definitely a hot topic.
The trade show
About four hundred booths total, Sun being naturally represented en masse. Other major vendors (biggest booths) are : Oracle, IBM, HP, Apple, BEA/WebLogic, Motorola and Persistence. I didn't get to see any breathtaking demo, though, which was a disappointment.
Of interest : Borland has ported JBuilder 3 to Solaris (and soon other Unixes, Linux being on top of the list). I saw the beta-version running (100% Java, running Swing) and I was pretty much impressed by its performance (UI-wise). The software was running on a SparcStation 5 (probably loaded with heaps of memory, but that's not a big deal nowadays) and the user interface was pretty slick. JBuilder 3 on Windows is about 90% Java, the 10% native being UI elements that were not up to the requirements of the Borland folks. I asked the demo guy about emacs support, his answer was half-satisfactory : they did add some extra-mapping to their JTextArea widget to support kill-rings and other emacsisms, but that's about it (they also have syntax-highlighting in emacs mode). I told him that by porting to Unix, they were treading on dangerous grounds and they would have to face a very demanding crowd of emacs rabid users. They seem to be aware of that but as of today, that's where the integration stops.
They also supply a bunch of extended Swing widgets easing up the connection to databases, which is a pretty good idea. Their GUI builder supports all the layouts, although I didn't get to see those demonstrated. The only other builder that I know that offers a WYSIWYG Swing builder is VJ++ 6.0 + 2lkit. It looks like the competition is beginning to arrive.
I don't mean to vouch for that particular product but it's worth mentioning because to me, it's the first example of an (apparently) usable Swing application on a client desktop. Time will tell if what I saw was Java being finally delivered to us mere mortals, or yet another smoke and mirror trick.
Transvirtual's slogan also caught my eye : "We support both Sun and Microsoft technologies". Microsoft couldn't have spelled "divergence" better.
NetDynamics was demonstrating version 5.0 of their application server. Version 5.1 is due out in September. The next big release will appear in 2000 and will feature Moscone. By then, they will have merged with Netscape's server.
Java Awards
An independent Java Awards Ceremony took place yesterday night hosted by Fawcette Technical Publications the Editors of Java Pro. Some results are interesting...