Daniel Steinberg has an interesing account of the Key Notes from JavaOne this year – he mentions in his article that they were lacking the ‘rally the troups’ enthusiasm from prior years. Was it that they were missing the McNealy-style jokes with his always anticipated Microsoft bashing?
I ony got to attend one day this year on Wednesday, and I admit the keynotes were a little bland. The BEA afternoon session was more of a corporate invester conference call than typical conference Key Note material. I had to leave early to get a train, but from what I saw, there wasn’t anything that got me that excited.
I can see Stenberg’s point. The last JavaOne I attented was 2001, and after every Key Note you left feeling so pumped up about Java that you wanted to race out of the hall and start coding! There was definitely less of that enthusiasm this year.
However, the emphasis seemed to have shifted out to the sessions themselves – the sessions I attended did make me feel ‘wow – that was awesome!’ each time they completed, and I am definitely fired up about new technologies such as EJB3.0 and Groovy, even though I had already been working with both prior to the conference. There still is definitely something very refreshing and invigorating about attending tech conferences – you leave feeling energized and empowered with new technologies and skills – and then get back to the real project world and realise – ‘oh, we’re still using J2EE 1.3’ … 🙂