The BileBlog

Here we go, the annual trek to that horrible wannabe city, San Francisco, to attend yet another JavaOne. For once I’m actually showing up before the event and so far I’m regretting it. I did go to the groovy/grails event in the hope of free loot and possibly some fun socialising.

Unsurprisingly, it was a bitter disappointment. It seemed to be ‘now that we have you all in a room, lets sit you down and lecture you for the next few hours. Here’s one beer to tide you over’. Still, for groovy fanboys it probably was a good jizzfest.

I did try to listen in and learn, I really really did. I lasted all of 10 minutes. Maybe I was just horrifically unlucky and just caught the crappiest 10 minutes, but really, the one message that every slide and peptalk seems to scream out is ‘this is useless junk, but it has serious peniswagglage points, so lets all waggle together’.

It’s a shame, really. I’m sure there are people out there doing useful things with groovy. I suspect these people aren’t doing any of the ‘awesome’ things that were being pimped here. Exactly what kind of moron you’d have to be to think that growl notifications of events is a useful feature? How about Groovy AOP? There’s something sort of sad about all these community plugins that are being developed. It’s basically a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time writing useless junk to gratify some bizarre sexual need.

The next bit I saw were a couple of demos. Again, mindblowing in their uselessness. I’m so so sick of mashups. Who the fuck uses them? Do they have ANY practical usage other than ‘oh look, we can combine two useful services into one useless pile of twaddle’? Is there a single mashup out there that’s actually useful, and does more than elicit a ‘oh, that’s cool, lets move on now’ sort of reaction? The grails example shown was delightful in its utter pointlessness. A mashup of flickr with google maps, where you can see pictures….of…..locations. Just what you’ve always wanted to do. Cheap at double the price.

The next example went from snazzy interface to a 1998 flashback. Remember what the rage was all then? You’ve luckily forgotten, so I’ll remind you. It was Swing hello world examples with a JButton. So, that’s what we’re shown. A JFrame, with, you guessed it, a JButton. These guys sure know how to party.

So I bailed, which is a shame as there were a lot of people I wanted to meet in there. Hopefully I’ll bump into most of them over the next few days.

Aside from all that, there’s something very curious about JavaOne this year. For some odd reason, I feel….personally invested. Having been part of the review board for the submitted talks, I really do hope that people enjoy the EE and web tracks. Participating in the process was a very gratifying experience; you’d be amazed at how many Sun talks were declined because they were vendor pitches!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 12:49 am and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.