Occasional Thoughts

Just some observations from JAX 2008, the great conference for enterprise Java developers on their choice of operating systems...

About 40% of presenters of talks I attended used Apple notebooks. I haven't noticed that anyone used Linux as choice for his operating system. There was also a very high amount of Apple users among the 2000 attendees. Around 10% used Apple systems. In contrast I have just seen a couple of people running Linux.

I was pretty surprised by this. I would have expected that there would be much more Java developers using Linux. Especially since there is still no Java 6 for Mac OS X is available since a few days and after I've read this posting in the blog of Vladimir Dobriakov, where he talks about his experiences with Mac OS X and his switch back to Linux.

But maybe a lot of the attendees use Linux just on their workstations and not on their laptops.

Call me crazy to try a hot update while I really required to work on my system. Would you dare to do this with SuSE Linux? Or with any Microsoft Windows version? Or with Mac OS? Well, even if you would dare, these operating systems do not allow you to do that.

As already mentioned in my first impressions about Kubuntu, I expected Kubuntu as a Debian based distribution to provide a smooth upgrade. I was so sure that this can be done that I even tried it, while having a workshop that required my laptop. I wasn't dissapointed. Even more... I was astonished how smooth the upgrade was performed actually. This is something most operating system users just can dream of: Doing an online upgrade in the background, while working on the machines in less than 2 hours just one day after the official release of the distribution.

...and brought many new ideas home. JAX 2008 was a great event, but also very exhausting. There were a total of 211 sessions from which to choose from starting at 08:30 in the morning with session until the late evening.

Main themes as I have collected them where:

• Dynamic Languages
• Spring
• SOA
• Eclipse
• Architectures
• Web frameworks and RIAs
• Complexity of the classic JEE offers. I would even say that I heard of a severe crisis of JEE and I doubt that a radically simplified EJB 3.1 will change peoples mind on that.

I used FreeMind to collect notes and here are the unedited notes I took during some of the sessions:

General Notes abut JAX 2008

In general JAX 2008 had more than 2000 participants - a record in the history of this conference. There where 211 sessions, 22 workshops and 10 short talks presented by 178 speakers. In my opinion JAX 2009 should rather try to reduce the amount of sessions and given the presenters more time. Most talks had to rush through the content as the time was limited to an hour and there was so much to say.

Here is the list of sessions from the time planer that I plan to attend: