I made the trek across "the ditch" to San Francisco for JavaOne 2008. Its pretty convenient from Sydney, direct flight, comfortable. What is not comfortable is the jet lag. I have never had it so bad, unbelievably bad.
Well the conference was not terribly exciting, but talking to everyone is always worth the effort. Its still very much Sun's conference, not the communities. Sun tend to have their influence everywhere - from their shoe-horning glassfish into all sorts of irrelevant places, and keynotes that "announce" tech that really have nothing to do with the community (JavaFX). That much is disappointing. Even the irrelevant fact that glassfish has a "kernel" of 98K was mentioned in the keynote ! What does that mean ! Nothing ! Its not really a kernel, but whatever. Sun seem to be driven partly out of spite, creating competing tech (or aquiring) - with no aim to make money, but only to compete etc.. Its not terribly surprising they are no longer making money - they had a terrible result recently. Terrible - makes me sad as they were a jewel of silicon valley once, and a good contributor to open source.
I liked JavaFX, would consider using it if it took off.
The most interesting thing all week was the Scala "lift off" conference I went to on saturday. I went with the express aim (and some preparation) to convince people how great it would be for scalac (compiler) to be able to have java and scala source mixed, including in IDE tooling. It turns out it is already on the way !
With such a smart group of people working on and around scala, and funded, it has a bright future. And not a moment too soon.
