General Notes

• There were somewhere between 12 and 14 thousand attendees. Java is really taking off in a lot of vertical markets.
• Thanks to the large attendance count, I had to get back into my DECUS mode, which meant rushing out of sessions right at the end and arriving early for a good seat at the next one. Some people didn't get lunch Monday (the conference organizers said that they had heavier-than-expected on-site registrations).
• I would guess that between 15 and 35% of the attendees were female, which is a great sign for our industry.
• People were talking about how they were using Java NOW for solving issues, mostly web and portability, but some were using Java because it sped up development by up to 50%.
• Most presenters used the JavaOne on-line template that is a variation of the Netscape presentation template that I've downloaded to my local website.
• A number of people were using JNI to break into Java by creating thin front ends for C++ classes which they would later either rewrite in Java or wrap in CORBA.
• I spoke for a while with a couple of compiler-people from HP on the exhibit floor after a pretty good session on compiler design from a guy from HP. They gave me an idea for optimizing C++ and I grabbed a little info on a product that compiles Java byte-codes into native HP executables - this allows for better optimizations in the compiler.
• Think three tier - everyone was talking about using thin Java clients linked to middle-tier Java business logic tied to third-tier information centers

The coolest thing at the conference had to be the Java Rings; come by and check mine out. It contains a full JavaCard 2.0-extended VM; the serial or parallel interface for the ring is available on-line now and costs $15. You can download applets to the ring, and it can store information between port accesses thanks to a 10-year memory battery. The computer itself is powered by the one bits - any downloader sends a series of one bits to the computer to power it up, and then each one bit sent thereafter adds to the ability of the processor to keep functioning. When you disconnect the ring from the interface, it goes dormant. The ring was built by Dallas Semiconductor (I wandered into the end of their session); they sell the active part of the ring as an iButton. This may well be the future for Java and for computing in general - we used our rings to hold our business card in an applet and to calculate points on a fractal (that meant we had a 14,000 node distributed system walking around Moscone Center for most of a week). On a personal note, the first computer I used heavily my father and I built at home from S100 cards, using a dual processor 8085-8088 system - my ring is more powerful than that system.... Here's a link to an article from JavaWorld on the Java Ring.

The coolest design tool had to be TogetherJ; Its by Peter Coad, who does lots of design-related stuff for Java and C++. The software was written by people in Germany and Russia. It interlinks code and UML tightly - you draw and you get code, you write code and the drawings update. I just downloaded it this morning (I woke up at 6:15 AM Thursday thanks to my watch) and will install it and play with it to see how well it works. They said they have a C++ version also....

I left Monday afternoon - the plane sat on the runway for a little over two hours due to restricted airlanes in San Francisco. The on-ground and early in-flight movie was "Rainmaker," which I hadn't seen before (I'd recommend it as a rental). They showed "Tomorrow Never Dies" later - still haven't seen it.... Took the shuttle to the hotel and arrived around 11:00 PM. The Palace Hotel is really cool - it dates from just after the fire and it is a very nice hotel.

Got up early Tuesday and had breakfast - I didn't know a continental breakfast was included, so I ate at the hotel, which was just as well as I was famished and tired (the flight was miserable and I just crashed Monday evening even though I was hungry). I walked over to the Moscone Center and finished registration, picking up all the toys, including my Java Ring and a knapsack and a tee-shirt (a Large - don't they know programmers come in all sizes?). I hit the Tuesday keynote and sessions, then went to the evening party in the exhibit area, which was nice (had a couple of beers and talked with a bunch of people working on various Java things).

Its Wednesday morning, and I felt much more at home - my old conference lessons were coming back to me. I stayed late for the BOF sessions - squeezed part way into the JNDI session and the JavaBlend BOF. The second round of BOFs included one on middleware with a rep from Tibco; I talked for a while with him and a rep from Open Horizon, which makes a competing Java product called Ambrosia (the Open Horizon rep used to work at Tibco, which made for some interesting conversations, including some knocks against ETX). One thing I came away with is that, while Tibco can supply a request/reply RMI style interface for Java and the TIB, they don't appear very willing to build a complete forms interface for the TIB. They appear to prefer a JNI or CORBA style binding to the TIB that is then accessed with Java applications. Their presentation discussed writing plugable models that could be transfered using the TIB in Java. The Open Horizons guys emphasized the new Java Messaging API as an important part of middleware solutions for Java. Iona was also present, and they said they plan to marry their Java and C++ orbs over the next year. They also talked about OTM, which has an Orbix core with transaction services (OTS), event queuing, SSL and names. They see some overlap with their work and Enterprise JavaBeans.

And, its now Thursday morning.... I hit the keynote and couldn't get into the sessions that interested me, so... I kicked out of the conference for about one-and-a-half hours for my only personal fun of the conference - I took a cab to the Cannery at the waterfron to visit Lark in the Morning . They sell all kinds of musical instruments, specializing in non-western and old European musical instruments. I bought a shruti box, which is an Indian drone instrument similar to a Harmonium but without a keyboard. I love it! The store in San Francisco is really cool - chock full of wierd instruments and CDs of ethnic music. If you go to San Fran and have some time, drop down to the Cannery and check out the store! I grabbed a quick lunch, hopped a cab and shot back to Moscone Center for the next session. Thursday night was the big party at Fort Mason near the bridge. They had two warehouses, one with the theme of the future CyberCafe casino, and the other retro 50s/60s/70s, including a "girl group" and an Elvis impersonator....

Its the home stretch - Friday morning and I'm still alive. I almost blew off one of the best sessions of the conference, the Friday keynote. The rest of the keynotes were pretty useless, but this one was cool. I hit sessions until 2:30 PM and left to catch my plane.

The flight to LA was uneventful, even easy (compared to the flight back here and out). I mostly relaxed in LA and asked Aviva to plan our itinerary. We went to the Temporary Contemporary and Contemporary Museums in LA (if you don't like conceptual performance art, skip these two), along with stops in Little Tokyo and Chinatown Saturday. Sunday we did the main art museum, which was very nice. The Las Angeles Museum of Art is contained in four buildings. The main exhibit up was a travelling show of a Muhgal book describing the life of the greatest Muhgal; the show was simply excellent. We bought the catalog (I hope I can convince Aviva to leave it upstairs and not take it to her basement studio). Monday we did the tourist thing - Santa Monica for lunch at a deli on 3rd, walk on the prominade and pier, then a drive up to Point Dume. Tuesday we went to the Armund Hammer Gallery at UCLA, where they had a travelling exhibit from the Vatican of angels in art; this exhibit is coming to the Detroit Institute of Art in the fall.

Well, it was time to leave Wednesday, and the airline curse continued.

Our flight scheduled for 11:40 departure was delayed due to maintenance, so they put us on a flight leaving at 3:00 PM. At least they gave us a lunch voucher.... The flight was otherwise uneventful, and I'm now back among you all!