JavaOne - Day One

I know it's a day late, but I thought I would try and get this down for anyone who cares. JavaOne kicked off with a bang in the morning with the General Session in the morning. We were all greeted with some rockin music and dancers performing on stage. Half way through James Goosling graced us with his presence and launched T-Shirts into the crowd. Rich Green of Sun gave the talk and really focused on Java and how it runs everywhere with sample from Amazon, Sony Ericson, a very cool Facebook application, and concluded with a demo from Neil Young (Yeah, the rocker Neil Young). All in all, it was a very good start to JavaOne.

After the General Session I started hitting up some of the technical sessions. I hit up JRuby at first to see how that project is progressing. I must say, it's coming along really nice. The biggest take away was the IDE support that NetBeans is providing, it's really nice and improving every day.

I was also fortunate enough to get invited to listen in on the JBI expert group. I must say I was rather impressed with what was discussed. The biggest take away was make sure you keep track of JBI and keep an eye on it over the coming months, I know I will be watching very closely.

The next session I went to was upcoming Java language changes. Some of the highlights were the following:

• Multi-catch statements
• Safe re-throw
• Modular programming
• Annotations enhancement

The biggest focus was on the additional support for annotations.

Next up was secure mashups with OpenAjax. This was of particular interest to me since my team is current working on some mashup technologies. The stuff that OpenAjax is putting out is definitely worth keeping tabs on.

Finally to end the day I attended the Grails in depth session. I know that I have a particulair interest in Groovy and Grails, but I've got to say that Grails freaking rocks. If your team is doing Agile development and need to get quick rapid proof of concepts done, then you really need to take a good hard look at Grails. With its use of industry standards such as Hibernate and Spring, and the 40+ plugins that have been developed you'd be almost crazy to start from scratch and have to write all of that stuff yourself.

All in all it was a good first day, now I've got to get ready for day two. I'll try and get that up tonight or first thing tomorrow morning.