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Best and worst of JavaOne 2002

A break down of the JavaOne 2002 electric boogaloo

By John D. Mitchell, JavaWorld.com, 04/02/02

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The five-day marathon of Sun Microsystems' 2002 JavaOne developer conference has come to an end. The success of this year's conference shows the resilience and strength of the Java development community. Herein are my personal rants and raves as I weaved my way through the show.

Best unintended consequence

In terms of attendance, the 2002 JavaOne conference hearkens back to Java's earlier years. My best guesstimate, based on conference buzz and previous conference crowds, is that about 12,000 people attended this year's show. We definitely missed y'all, but I didn't mind a less crowded conference hall.

In talking with various vendors, they reported that total booth traffic was down from previous years. The upside was that they got to spend more quality time with people, more of whom seemed interested in their products and technologies.

In talking with various attendees, most really liked that they could spend more time chatting with other attendees and vendors. Yeah, there was the usual running around between sessions, but the overload factor was lower than the frenetic pace of a couple years ago.

Worst unintended consequence

Every year, JavaOne attendees receive some sort of bag to carry all the schwag and what not. This year's bag combined a backpack with a roller bag. That is, you could wear it as a backpack or extend the telescopic handle and pull the bag behind you on its small wheels.

I didn't care for the bag because the roller feature takes up way too much valuable storage space. But, based on feedback and observation of other attendees, the roller bag was a big hit.

Alas, this silver cloud did have a dark lining. It seemed everybody rolled the darn things around the show -- even through thick crowds. That exacerbated the crowds getting into and out of the sessions, and caused a good bit of consternation as people stumbled over them.

Hype of the year

Every JavaOne seems to have a theme that pervades the show. The hyped theme this year was a combination of "end-to-end" and "mobility." Yes, as expected, there was a good bit of blather about Web services, but even that was primarily in the contexts of creating complete end-to-end and mobile solutions. A good part of the end-to-end push was an attempt to leverage Java's success as a server-side solution and reposition Java as a strong client-side solution for the desktop and for devices, such as phones, PDAs, and set-top boxes.

Biggest keynote letdown

Last year's keynotes were extra memorable because Oracle's Larry Ellison actually showed up and made several ridiculous and outlandish comments. I expected something similarly fun (and funny) this year. Instead, Thomas Kurian's, senior vice president of Oracle's server technologies division, keynote, though more technologically focused, was just part and parcel with the rest of the mostly boring techno-marketing-hype keynotes. I guess I'll just have to better manage my expectations for next year. Even better, if Sun would put the keynote videos up on the Web sooner, I could sleep in and not miss anything important.

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