Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Overall the 2007 JavaOne conference was worth the trip, but it was not without some annoyances (of course). For me personally though, more of the value was in actually (and finally) meeting people that I have emailed or IMd through the years than it was in the sessions.

Most of the sessions, sadly, were boring and basic. Many of them were putting me to sleep, some I walked out of, one or two I stayed in out of sheer pity for the speakers when the rest of the room left. I signed up for mainly JEE and SOA related sessions, with a sprinkling of RIA/UI/Swing sessions mixed in to keep me awake. The UI sessions and were a bit more engaging for me, because I am less familiar with that side of the house. Yet even there many of the sessions were less than exciting.

Despite the underwhelming majority, I did see also several very good sessions. These included the following: the entertaining Puzzlers session by Bill Pugh and Joshua Bloch, the generics/general Java discussion also by Joshua Bloch, the GWT session by Bruce and Joel, several UI/Swing talks by the swing labs teams and others (including Romain Guy and his "shit happens" error handling transition/animation). Overall for me a theme emerged, the sessions that Google employees were holding/having were generally a cut above the rest. These sessions were the most focused and polished, and had the most depth (including direct answers in the Q and A sessions, rather than "let's take that offline").

The ab5k-Glossitope session by Cooper and Josh Marinacci was good also - there were a few glitches but overall it was well delivered and impressive (I hadn't seen the widgets outside of the container feature before, nice). If you havent seen Glossitope yet you should check it out (desktop widgets for Java). And Chris Adamson's "NuDiddler" widget is the most useful one I have seen yet - convenient code snippet runner.

Apart from the sessions, which get an overall unimpressive grade despite the few gems, the management of the conference was, I felt, fairly poor. The facility (Moscone), rooms, technical services, meals and so on were ultimately fine - but the coordination of getting people to places was shitty. The lines were really long, and they made you leave the room and line back up for the next session even if your next session was in the SAME room (sure they need you to sign in again, but just put a little badge reader IN the room, etc). Adding to the annoyance of the long lines was the fact that the lines were not maintained in any fashion - they would open up one line and wind people down hallways, and then when the room opened they would screw those who had been waiting by opening another door and letting other people walk right in (ending up with two lines, rather than just funneling the one line into two doors). Also the on site staff was very gruff. On several occasions they literally yelled at "all you people" for standing in the back of the room to catch a session and they generally barked orders about - overall pretty rude. Adding to all that, one of the reasons I havent blogged this week was that basically I did not have net access. The Sun WiFi in Moscone was brutally slow and unreliable, and outside Moscone my fancy hotel coverage (for 15 bucks a day) was even worse.

In addition to the lines and the general attitude of the staff, the attendees at the talks were pretty rude too. In every session there were people taking pictures. Now pictures are fine, but fucking please turn OFF the flash (no really, set the exposure correctly and don't use the flash). The slides are available to attendees the day of the talk at 6AM, and those PDFs are better than your over my shoulder flash photography, guaranteed. Also, you do realize that digital camera shutter simulation noise can be disabled right? Noise was another constant problem, who the fuck uses the default annoying cell phone ring in the first place, much less leaves it on full blast in a conference. Amazingly discourteous assholes, that's who - and one or two were in every session. Now, to keep this entire post from being a whining session I will move on to some of the good stuff.

The highlights for me were a few sessions and the parties/bar meetings. These included the GWT hack session Google held, and the Google seKr3t party. At the hack session I met many of the GWT team guys (some for the first time) and the book I am working on (GWT in Practice) got mentioned several times. Bruce Johnson said at one point that we should come over for lunch (since we are all in Atlanta - we won't hold our breath, but I would love to go to Google and hang out a bit more with the GWT team). Later at the Google party, with an open bar, I met the JavaPosse guys, Romain Guy, much of the Cenqua team (Aussie!, Aussie!, Aussie!) and many more people that I can't remember right now. After the Google party we ended up in a few more bars and hung out with the Cenqua guys until last call. We closed down the bars on other nights as well, with a different crew (among them Josh Marinacci, Jonathan Simon, and again more I cannot recall).

Overall it was a good conference, but again, it was more about the people and the connections than the actual presentations - which though maybe not surprising was still a bit disappointing.