I had an awesome day today at the first day of the conference. It was called CommunityOne and was free and open to anyone who was interested in the java platform. There was a big focus on Rich Internet Applications and therefore running scripting languages (like ruby and python) within the JVM and taking advantage of the 15 years of optimisations and new features.
After walking about 10 mins down the road, past Union Square I got to the Moscone Centre. I can’t really describe how huge this place is… really. I will take some photos. I completed registration and was given the access card and then picked up the first load of corporate tat. This was a sweet JavaOne bag with a really nice laptop section, a JavaOne tshirt and assorted advertising and cds. Then down the main pavilion to get the CommunityOne tshirt and OpenSolaris cd.
With the change of timeframes I missed the keynote at 9.30am but made it
the first session of how to use jMaki to
make really simple ajax applications. Although in a demo, everything
looks easy, it is not until you need to customise it you realise how
good it is. The next session was how to build Ajax applications within
NetBeans (I see a theme emerging here). This was good to see some
real code being written and I am seriously going to look at Apache
Wicket. This framework allows you to write
Ajax applications with just .html and .java files, not .js files
anywhere to be seen which is great for us java devs. Although that is a
pitty because we can’t use the brilliant JavaScript Editor Plugin for
Netbeans. Yes yes I know, I should be flying
the Eclipse flag, but NetBeans is pretty
amazing for web apps. I will be extolling the virtues of
“OpenSolaris”http://opensolaris.org by the end of the week I’m sure!
After that was a presentation from the OpenSSO developers about how to use federated identity across multiple applications, basically what I am doing at State Service Commission. The example they used was a corporate person logging into Salesforce via NT Authentication (ie, not username/password needed). Then a quick introduction to the new Java Persistence API 3.0.
After that was the Community Reception in the MASSIVE main hall with
some nice sounds on a bass machine (formerly known as a stereo) and free
American beer (yuk) and even more free OpenSolaris stuff (this time a
tshirt and stickers). I am definitely loving the corporate tat, I barely
needed to bring any clothes
There is breakfast at the conference tomorrow and then the keynote (there is one every morning) starts at 8.30am. This one is hosted by the EVP of Sun.
If you hadn’t guessed I’m having a great time ;)
I will post some photos from the first day tomorrow when I have faster net. The internet speed is blazing over here, with everyone twittering etc, I was downloading at flat 2 MB/sec from a US server ;)