Sun Developer Day Review

As I said earlier, I went to the Sun Developer Day in Sydney today. Overall, well worth the price of admission. Heck, I’d have paid double. 😉

Some highlights:

• I took 19 pages of notes. That’s amazing for me.
• There was a moderately cool demo of wearable computers, largely as an extension to a theme on how ubiquitous networked devices would be. Lots of RFID show-offs. However, even though he (tried) an augmented reality demo, he didn’t do that one where you get a Doom game projected into real life. Ah well. 🙂
• Best practices in J2EE development was mildly interesting. Didn’t learn much, but I got some new terminology to look out for. Most of what they described, I already do. 🙂 I did get a partial acknowledgement from the presenter that the CMP engine in certain app servers provided by companies whose name starts with B are rather crappy.
• New features in J2SE 1.5 presentation was good. Lots of notes here, largely because I’ll have to be able to re-give this presentation. I already knew about the language features, but the chance to see annotations up close was good. Somehow I’d missed hearing about java.util.concurrent; looks pretty good. I’m very interested in the new JVM monitoring features.
• Garbage collection talk was the other real highlight for me; best explanation I’ve ever heard for it, and cleared up some misunderstandings I had. I’ll write more about this later.
• Java Studio Creator demo was interesting; I’m going to have to look into Studio a bit more, simply because people at work will start using tools like this for Q&D applications. I’ve got my doubts about this sort of tool, but it was interesting.

That’s about half the presentations that were given that I really enjoyed. The other half were also good, but not particularly relevant to me; about par for the course.

The presenters were real techs, not marketers. Although the push for Sun products was far from subtle, it wasn’t the point of the day, and that was very clear. In the words of the head presenter, a Reginald Hutcherson, it was a “geekfest”.

If you read this before Wednesday morning, and you’re in Melbourne, pop along to that one. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Author: Robert Watkins

My name is Robert Watkins. I am a software developer and have been for over 20 years now. I currently work for people, but my opinions here are in no way endorsed by them (which is cool; their opinions aren’t endorsed by me either). My main professional interests are in Java development, using Agile methods, with a historical focus on building web based applications. I’m also a Mac-fan and love my iPhone, which I’m currently learning how to code for. I live and work in Brisbane, Australia, but I grew up in the Northern Territory, and still find Brisbane too cold (after 22 years here). I’m married, with two children and one cat. My politics are socialist in tendency, my religious affiliation is atheist (aka “none of the above”), my attitude is condescending and my moral standing is lying down. View all posts by Robert Watkins