The BileBlog

I usually try to avoid these things like the plague. The sheer volume of vendor jizz spurting everywhere is overwhelming to say the least. Sadly though due to waking up stupidly early, I had nothing better to do so thought I’d give this one a shot to see if it’s as abysmal as I expected it to be.

Interestingly, I was somewhat disappointed. The whole thing actually wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. It was somewhat cool to see the hall packed with that many people, all of whom are Java developers. The loud thumping music though before starting was somewhat confusing, it’s way too early to have the contents of one’s stomach shaken about so violently. The video playing in the background before the start was also a bit perplexing. I could have sworn that at some point the mullet guide website was shown. Kudos to whoever picked that one, correct mullet identification is a crucial first step in eradicating this modern day plague.

First up we have John Gage. I had never seen John speak before and I must say, he comes across awfully well. He has a soothing wise voice and looks like a kindly trustworthy old man. You find yourself wanting to have children just so you could sell them to him; surely he’d know what to do with them better than you would.

Next up we have Rich Green. Rich Green is a confusing mixture of the ugly half of Sean Penn, and the uncharismatic half of Steve Jobs (this isn’t an insult, honest!). So far, the message has been so generic that any company could have delivered it. Lots of woowoo about community, people, how we must all get naked and hug, enabling blahblah, wibblepoopmobiles.

Rich brings up a number of people to the stage, some of which are better than others. This works reasonably well except for this excruciating moments where Rich does that double act Q & A thing. This always comes off as so awkward and rehearsed (badly), that you wonder why presenters keep resorting to this cheap trick. Really, do people honestly think that Rich asking someone ’so, do you have anything else to show us?’ and the guy piping up with ‘Actually, I have a video to show!’ is in any way a real or meaningful conversation?

The NASDAQ CIO is up next, and she talks about the volume of transactions their platform handles (all Java), it’s over 100k/second. Now this might be a crazy wild guess, but I have a strong suspicion that they aren’t using JOTM or JBoss.

Next up is some new product pitch (JavaFX) which looks like another Sun harebrained scheme to innovate. It’s mildly interesting I guess but the talk, unsurprisingly, is so nebulous and general that it’s hard to see concrete applications or who would use this stuff, when, how, and why.

Some light entertainment ensues however when the mobile demos keep going wrong. Maybe it’s the vindictive child within, but I’m always so gleeful when a demo goes wrong. The awkwardness, the long pauses, the nervous chuckles, the botched recovery, it’s all so very satisfying.

The talk wraps up with Scott McNealy and a UN guy, both of whom give rousing talks about the importance of community and good works. I must say, I was very touched by this. It’s really nice to see this kind of thing in an industry where we’re all obscenely overpaid. I hope that some of what they said resonated with the crowd, it certainly did with me. I wonder if the Engineers Without Borders comment was a joke or a concrete scheme. Utterly irrelevant to Java of course, and pointless in terms of its impact on shareholders, users, and developers. Perhaps that’s why it was so nice to hear; it wasn’t a pitch and was uncharacteristically earnest.

All in all, I actually found the whole thing faintly enjoyable. It certainly beat the living shit out of the idiotic BEA general session I went to last year, where all they could do is talk about how we must make our genitalia ‘liquid’ by entrusting the big BEA ‘blend’er in the sky. Eurgh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 12:39 pm 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.