Well last day of JavaOne :(, its been quite a ride.  In this morning’s General Session James Gosling (the creator of Java) did a show-off of all the awesome toys that had been shown off during the conference.  Some of them were:

• The robotic car Tommy
• These little sensors running Java that create a MESH RF network so they can talk to one another and a base station
  A pen with a computer and camera in it that records your writing and is able to play it back and import it into the computer and all sorts of awesome stuff
• VisualVM, a tool that allows you to connect to a local or remote java process and see the resource use with graphs and stuff, very handy
• Some of the Java technology used at the CERN particle accelerator
• JMars, a mapping tool used to collate all the data from the mars probes and help NASA choose a landing spot near to mineral deposits and the like

First session today was how Yahoo! (they said it was the largest website in the world…) use Java technology and how they manage thousands of servers around the word and also hundreds of developers around the world too.  I didn’t learn anything useful but it was interesting nontheless.  Then a session about how to create your own SMS based application, and how you can hack the google text api to do what you want!  Then a performance comparison between the 3 big web frameworks, SpringMVC, Structs and JavaServer Faces.  SpringMVC beat the pants off the other two (and quite rightly so, but I am biased).  Then there was a session about how NavTeq use thousands of sensors and GPS devices to gather statistics about traffic flow.  This information is sent to radio stations and GPS units so they can re-route around the problem if possible.  the final session of the day was perhaps the best.  It was brilliant talk by the lead developer from SpringSource about the new changes coming to the Spring Framework and SpringMVC in version 2.5.  Basically they have heard the community’s hatred of xml config files and now EVERYTHING can be done with annotations.  But you can still do xml if you really want to.

So that was JavaOne I guess.  What a ride it was, I have learnt so much and talked to so many amazingly smart people.  I’ve seen some mindblowing use of Java and technology in general and has really invigorated me back into Java.  Java cops a lot of flack from the scripting language world (some of it quite rightly too) but it was nice to have a week where everything was Java and how awesome and extensive and fast moving it is.

I don’t think I mentioned that the slogan for JavaOne was ‘Java + You’ to go with Time magazine’s person of the year ‘You’.  There was a huge focus on Ajax and web services and open standards that was really nice to see.  This will definitely not be my last JavaOne that is for sure!!!

There is no rest for the wicked around here, so on my first day off I am going on a day-long tour of all the sights and sounds of San Fran and then across the Golden gate Bridge to the Italian town of Sausalito.

This will be my last post in the JavaOne category so if you just subscribed to that, I will see you when I return next week.  But for me its a week of fun and games…