I just returned home from a week in San Francisco at the JavaOne conference, I mean literally like 2 hours ago. This is the first time I’ve been to any conference like this, and I had a great time! The scale of this thing is really impressive, I mean it’s huge. The planning and logistics that go into putting on a conference of this size just amazes me. It felt like they really went all out, all the small details were handled, and you could see the effort they put into making it a special experience.

I had originally registered for tech sessions Tuesday – Thursday, but Thursday night I just wasn’t ready for it to end, and ended up cramming 2 more sessions in on Friday morning before jumping in a cab for the airport. I literally was in a cab 15 minutes after my final session.
Overall, I attended 19 technical sessions over 3 1/2 days, plus the general session keynotes.

I attended sessions on the different dynamic scripting languages that run on the JVM, many on concurrency, and then some on how to use those dynamic languages to solve concurrency problems. I had sessions on Spring, and REST using JAX-RS, sessions on unit testing and some of the tools available. I had a session on defective java with the man behind FindBugs, and a session on Effective Java (2nd Edition)
with one of the absolute rock-stars of the java world, Joshua Bloch. My session on Spring 3.0 was given by THE man behind Spring, Rod Johnson. My sessions on Lift and Clojure were both given by the creators of the language, and the session on JAX-RS was given by the writers of the specification. When I went to hear about how the Google App Engine now supports java, it was directly from the 3 guys responsible for it. I mean, talk about getting it from the source! That google session led to a very late night with my co-worker as we sat in the bar playing with the new sdk until 1am! Of course, the highlight was a late night session with the Java Posse, the whole reason I wanted to go in the first place. Even at the conference party on Thursday, when the band was covering Africa and Rosanna, it was the actual lead singer from Toto singing on stage!
Of course, it was some of the non-session encounters that made the conference even better. I randomly ran into the Java Posse guys in the hall and got a few words with them. The host of the whole conference, Chris Mellisinos, happened to be sitting next to me in the hotel bar one night, and so I got to chat with him. Sat next to the author of JAX-RS during a session on the new Drizzle database, and then was honored to talk for a bit with Joshua Bloch when he stayed hours after his book signing just to hang with everyone.

If you want a bigger perspective on the conference, search twitter for the #javaone hashtag, and follow me, @hashbrown1, as I was tweeting all week (when I could get a good connection).

So obviously I have tons of notes spread between my computer and a notepad (after my battery would die), and so I hope to be blogging in more detail about some of the things I learned. Don’t look for it too soon though, I need to spend a few days in the yard.

-HB