JavaOne: Day 0 Recap

Yesterday wasn’t really JavaOne — it was only Communityone and the Pavilion. But it was an interesting day nonetheless, with tempting hints at the events to come.

First of all, a bit of setting: JavaOne is in San Francisco. With the reputation of the Bay Area as such a technology hub, I was expecting some high-tech world of pervasive gizmos and gadgets and whiz-bang awesomeness. That is not San Fransisco. When you think about San Francisco, think “Manhattan as done by Californians”. And think excellent whisky and cocktails (but more on that later).

The Marscone center, where JavaOne is hosted, is a bit of a surprising place itself. The convention center is divided by a fairly busy street, and most of the activity is underneath the city. This gives the impression of descending into the belly of a particularly festive spaceship. The situation is not as claustrophobic as I originally expected it to be: all in all, the site is pretty good. And if you come up for air, AMD’s got free Pac-Man and Asteroids and Air Hockey and Rock Band and bean bag chairs.

Once down there, the scene is dominated by the Pavilion. The Pavilion is predominantly a sale force for vendors, but there isn’t any hard-selling or harassment: instead, there’s a lot of computers set up with people doing on-the-spot demos and little spaces with people running through a slide deck. This floor had plenty of unsurprising vendors (e.g. Adobe and SpringSource), but had a few that surprised me, including Engine Yard (presumably for their JRuby on Rails support), Inria, Blackberry, and Sun-Oracle’s surprise new BFF, Microsoft.

For my part, I hung out with SpringSource and NFJSOne. Finally met up with a number of people (including Mr. Groovy Himself). After a short while kibitzing and figuring out how press works, there was an impromptu (to me, anyway) planning session for a No Fluff, Just Stuff Groovy/Grails conference in New Orleans in October.

That meeting was unceremoniously ended by a flag-wielding half-dressed barbarian horde/drum line. No, really: video 1, video 2. This basically demonstrates the basic very curious theme at JavaOne: Java is cool, and innovative, and edgy-without-calling-itself-edgy. With the enterprisey JavaOne being squashed between the perennially über-sexy Google I/O and fanboytastic Apple WWDC, it really has the feeling of being rather self-conscious.