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Ninth annual Inprise Conference reveals juicy bits of Java news

Sessions stress Delphi, databases, and CORBA, but JDK 1.2, HotSpot, Swing, beans, and JBuilder grab attention too

By John Zukowski, JavaWorld.com, 09/01/98

This week (August 10 through 12), more than 3,000 attendees braved the high altitude in downtown Denver, CO, to attend the close to 300 technical sessions offered at the ninth annual Inprise Conference (ICon '98). As a Java developer at a conference where the majority of sessions were related to non-Java topics (for example, Delphi, databases, and CORBA), I found there was enough Java information to keep almost anyone happy.

The show started on Monday, August 10, with two full days of pre-conference tutorials -- including those on Java-related topics such as Swing and JavaBeans -- and introductory talks on Java, JBuilder, and database application development with JBuilder.

Opening amusements

Inprise chairman and CEO Del Yocam opened the conference with an amusing video of Inprise personnel dressed in the style of King Arthur, or more appropriately, "King Delbert." After a young Delbert pulled the sword "Active Xcalibur" from a stone in "Bor-land," he led a quest for the ORB of Knowledge, directed by Merlin -- better known as "David I" after Inprise Developer Relations Director David Intersimone.

David Intersimone, from Inprise, decked out as Merlin

After the stage show was over, Yocam got serious, discussing Inprise as a new company -- not simply a renamed Borland. According to Yocam, Inprise is an entirely new entity created out of Borland and Visigenics.

In his keynote, Yocam articulated the key theme of the conference: the use of Inprise development tools to create and deploy distributed enterprise applications, connected via CORBA and the VisiBroker ORB (object request broker). While the importance of Java -- and naturally of the company's JBuilder -- were discussed, the significance of VisiBroker also received a great deal of attention.

Java agenda

Beyond the pre-conference tutorials, the regular conference sessions ranged in content from design and methodology sessions to programming, tools, and techniques sessions and beyond. At beginning sessions, one could learn about testing techniques with Java applets and applications, as well as database development issues involved in using JBuilder. As the sessions increased in complexity, they became more interesting to me, up to the "wizard" session about JIT, HotSpot, and native compilers. Sessions were full of useful and practical Java information from many of the industries' well-regarded experts. Attendees even had the opportunity to meet the JBuilder development team. The majority of sessions were at the intermediate level, and discussed topics like JNI, servlets, JavaBeans, and performance tuning -- delivered in such a way as to be accessible even to the Java novice.

VisiBroker does Java

Besides all the Java-related information available from the JBuilder session track, there was much available elsewhere. The VisiBroker track included sessions on CORBA, Java, and Enterprise JavaBeans, as well as integrating CORBA and Java. Also, for those Java developers unfamiliar with CORBA, there were introduction sessions to learn about the basic essentials. Inprise executives also stressed VisiBroker's market successes and technology "firsts":

 

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