JavaOne 2009

I'm writing this on my way to JavaOne 2009. San Francisco airport was fogged in so my flight was cancelled. I have some time to burn: I'm waiting for a train to take me from Santa Clara to San Francisco.

As usual it has been immensely busy in the two months before JavaOne.

For this JavaOne, I'm the lead of the SOA/Services track. A track lead is responsible for assembling a program of sessions and BOFs. Or in more practical terms, going through the proposals with the other volunteers that make up the selection committee, and picking the proposals so that not only the quality but also the variety of the track is optimal. The selection committee consists of subject matter experts. There are three from Sun and four from other companies: RedHat, Cap Gemini, Adobe.

This year there again were many hundreds of proposals for sessions and BOFs. Going through them to make a first cut took a lot of time. Refining the first cut to the final selection is difficult: there were many good and interesting proposals. But in the end only 22 sessions could prevail. Getting consensus on the selections, scheduling them, ensuring that presentations are ready, reviewing the presentations, the inevitable change requests, etc. took a lot more time than I expected. But I think these efforts have paid off: I think we have a very interesting lineup of presentations.

My second JavaOne activity is presenting at Java University, the day before JavaOne. Like last year, Joe Boulenouar invited me to present a few hours on SOA and integration middleware. The course title is "Using Java EE and SOA to Help Architect and Design Robust Enterprise Applications." Last year there were four hundred or so people in attendance. I haven't heard yet how many people there will be this year. Perhaps fewer on account of the poor the economy.

Thirdly, I'm presenting a session titled "Glassfish ESB: get your apps on the bus". The original plan was that Keith Babo would pull that wagon, but unfortunately he had to pull out. I'm now doing that session with Sujit Biswas. In this session I'm making a case for ESBs or integration middleware in general. This has led me to some more thoughts on how we can widen the applicability of ESBs. More about that in a future post.

I'm also doing a session titled "Rethinking the ESB: lessons learned challenging the limitations and pitfalls". Andi Egloff is co-presenter. The idea of this session is to show a number of things that went wrong in previous product releases and how we changed that in subsequent releases. The interesting part for the audience is that it gives a set of requirements or "things to avoid" in middleware products.

The fifth activity I'm involved in is the OpenESB community BOF. The idea of this BOF is to discuss experiences with OpenESB and discuss what's on the wish list for OpenESB.

So, yes, it was busy running up to JavaOne. I'm sure that JavaOne itself will also be very busy: not only will there be the presentations I need to give, others I have to be in attendance for, but there will also be the numerous customer meetings.

I think I'll need a break after JavaOne!