JavaOne 2009

It’s been 11 years since my last visit to JavaOne 1998 conference in San Francisco. I was starting with Java, I was young and eager to learn anything and everything in order to be a more successful Java developer. Here I am again, at JavaOne 2009. Well, not much changed (except for the young part). I am still trying to learn as much as I can to see what others are doing in order to make my team a better development team and to make sure that my architectural and other technical decisions are not just based on my experience but on experiences of other technology executives and architects alike.

4 days were filled with very informative technical sessions, meeting other technologists from all over the world, learning about new and important developments and enjoying a great developer atmosphere in a great city.

There were a few hundred sessions so I had to choose carefully. I was able to fit 5 to 6 sessions per day. I was primarily interested in learning more about developments in the areas of mobile, web 2.0, performance, frameworks and architecture.

Here is a quick synopsis of what I’ve heard and seen a lot:

• JavaFX will be replacing Java AWT and Swing and possibly even Java ME. Sun and soon Oracle are really pushing JavaFX forward.

• OpenSocial and Facebook api are becoming more and more popular for developing and accessing social web applications.

• Spring Framework is getting better and better. Version 3.0 looks very promising.

• Forget about stateful web applications. IF you want flexibility and scalability look seriously into using REST.

• We all knew it but it’s worth repeating – architecture must be as simple as possible and as flexible as possible.

• Asynchronous event processing is probably the most important aspect of system performance and scalability.

• I was surprised to see by my estimate almost half of attendees who brought their laptops to sessions used MacBooks.

• James Gosling is still going strong and moving Java forward.

If you’ve never been to JavaOne try it next year. It’s a wonderful experience.