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The JavaOne grapevine, Part 1

Daily updates from the 2002 JavaOne Conference floor

By Humphrey Sheil, JavaWorld.com, 03/26/02

March 26, 2002 -- Here we are again, back at the JavaOne Conference in beautiful San Francisco -- a little earlier than usual, but the weather has been perfect and promises to improve as the week goes on (not that I'm here for the weather of course!). I believe attendance is down compared to previous JavaOne conferences. When asked for an exact attendance figure, a Sun Microsystems' spokesman didn't have a number.

Read the whole "The JavaOne Grapevine" series:

• Part 1: Daily updates from the 2002 JavaOne Conference floor
• Part 2: JCP changes, Oracle's Java strategy, JavaServer Faces news, and more
• Part 3: The Concurrency Utilities BOF, IBM and Java, JiniFest, and more
• Part 4: One last look at the technical sessions, Intel and TogetherSoft, and Java's future

Over the course of the week, I'll write articles covering the hot technologies, important vendor news, and interesting opinions most relevant to Java developers. The major vendors all have strong presences; I'll cover each by the end of the week. The sessions and BOFs (birds of a feather meeting) look interesting, so all in all, I aim to get a lot out of JavaOne this year.

This article, the first of the four, touches Monday's general and technical keynotes, the TS-3243: The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Overview and Roadmap session, BEA Systems' new WebLogic Developer tool, and some thoughts on the winners of the 2002 JavaWorld Editors' Choice Awards.

Without further ado, let's dive right into the conference.

The keynotes

Monday featured two keynotes: a morning conference keynote and an afternoon technical keynote. At Monday's morning conference keynote, Sun Microsystems' Chief Researcher John Gage, as usual, kicked off the proceedings, followed by a procession of Sun Microsystems VPs, and executive VPs including Executive VP Patricia Sueltz, VP Rob Gingell, and VP Rich Green.

Want the bluffer's guide to the keynotes? Here goes: Web services will change our world (yeah, right); mobile computing is where all the action is; Microsoft still works its evil; and James Gosling is still da man.

Sun clearly made an effort to focus Monday's keynotes on technical matters, a point echoed by Sueltz when she informed us that this year's conference emphasizes technology over marketing). Green presented impressive statistics on Java technology and its adoption worldwide, although I find his prediction of over 700 million Java-powered devices in existence by 2004 (up from 14.1 million last year) to be wildly over-optimistic. J2SE (Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition) 1.4 has clocked more than 1.25 million downloads since its release, according to Green, which bodes well for the latest evolution of the JDK.

Green also introduced an interesting project code-named "Monty," in which part of Sun's J2SE Hotspot JVM team works to improve J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition). Green claimed performance improvements in the 5x to 10x range, reduced power consumption, and a trimmed memory footprint.

On the J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) front, Green made several announcements including the release of the Application Verification Kit (AVK), which aims to help developers ensure their J2EE applications conform to the various J2EE specifications. My interest was really piqued by this, and I'm (ahem!) looking forward to putting my projects through the AVK when I get home.