JavaOne halfway point

To say that I am seriously tired of JavaFX at this point, would be a gross understatement. So let's not even go there.

CommunityOne was a nice event. I like the feeling of it more and more, and the new open spaces approach seemed to be really successful. The alternative languages presentations were well attended and good. I recommend anyone in the Bay Area, or anyone attending JavaOne, to make the effort to go to CommunityOne next year. It's definitely worth it.

Tuesday was, for undisclosed reasons, a day where I didn't attend so many presentations. In fact, I missed both the keynote and Tom&Charlies JRuby talk. Bad on me. I did manage to go to both the technical session and the BOF about upcoming language features in Java 7. Let me say immediately that I don't want pluggable type systems as a part of Java. Yes, they are useful in certain settings, but they don't fit Java. Not at all. I'm all for having it possible to have annotations in more places, but not for type systems.

Wednesday was "my" day of the conference. Started out early with the Script Bowl, where Groovy, JRuby, Jython and Scala faced off in three different challenges. I was one of the three judges. It was a actually a great fun. Some people have gotten annoyed at it, but I feel that they are taking it too seriously. This format was a good way of introducing the audience to the capabilities of four languages that are sometimes very much alike and sometimes very different.

It's also interesting to note that Charles was the only one of the panel who solved his challenges by asking the community for help with it. In fact, Charles didn't do any of them himself, while the other three did their code in isolation. My opinion is that this shows a difference in attitude between the communities, and it's very interesting.

After that I took it easy for some time, and then it was time for my JRuby on Rails presentation. It went fairly well and was also well attended. I did a serious mistake in my database configuration, but Tom helped me out and the rest of the demonstrations was good.

I did a book signing session after that and then headed back to the office for a while before coming back and holding my JRuby at ThoughtWorks BOF which was also nice.

Today I'm going to take it easy and relax. I'll go to Nick's session in an hour and then I'll go to Josh and Brian's BOF tonight. After that we host a party which I'm going to attend for a while. It's going to be a nice day.