Looking forward to JavaOne

Only one month left to this years JavaOne in San Francisco. About 8 to 10 Java geeks from my company will be heading to the US for the conference. We are leaving Stockholm May 29 to fly to San Francisco via Frankfurt. I am really happy I was selected to go to Java One this year. It is a great opportunity to get some fresh ideas from the Java Community. Also I am meeting a good friend which I haven't visited since 2002.

Today I received an email from JavaOne team that the schedule builder was ready and that it was recommended to put together a list of sessions I would like to attend. Unlike other software development conferences like OOPSLA, where everything is rather small, JavaOne is supposed to be quite crowdy and rooms fill up fast. So I spent some minutes today to build up my preliminary Java One session schedule.

Compared to OOPSLA 2008, the Java One is very Sun focused. A lot of talks are about Sun libraries, applications and tools. Since we are not using Glassfish application server or Java Server Faces, I decided to skip on these talks. The this years big hype seems to be Cloud Computing. There are tons of sessions having the word “cloud” in the title. Another big topic is REST and web services in general. Not sooo many talks are about dynamic languages this year I think. Unfortunately I skipped all the great Scala sessions at last years OOPSLA, as I did not knew what Scala was back then. There are now 3 talks about Scala and the Scala web framework Lift which I will be attending to. Unfortunately there are no sessions about Apache Wicket, my current favorite web framework.

Some of the session I really look forward to:

(TS-6802) Hadoop, a Highly Scalable, Distributed File/Data Processing System
Implemented in Java™ Technology

This is about an open source implementation of Google's Map Reduce algorithm, which comes in handy if you have to deal with gigantic sets of data. This would be the case if you harvest user behavior on the web to use it for Collective Intelligence, an area which fascinates me very much right now.

(BOF-3820) Lift: The Best Way to Create Rich Internet Applications with Scala

As Groovy went more or less by me, I decided to work myself in into Scala. There was a series about Scala in the German Java Magazin that woke my interested. Lift is the Scala webframework that supposingly “steals” the best features from other Java based web frameworks. They borrow the strict separation of layout and business logic from Apache Wicket, which is one of my favorite libraries for web development today.

(BOF-5105) Hudson Community Meet-Up

Writing Hudson plugins is fun. I wrote a plugin for Testability Explorer last Christmas and I am hoping to meet Kohsuke and some nice people I had mail contact with via the Hudson community like Ulli Hafner.

Finally some sessions focusing on scaleability and performance which I am hoping to put into practice in our company as we deal with a gaming application that need to be high performant.

(TS-4407) Best Practices for Large-Scale Web Sites: Lessons from eBay

(TS-4696) JDBC? We Don't Need No Stinkin’ JDBC: How LinkedIn Scaled with memcached, SOA, and a Bit of SQL

(TS-4588) Where’s My I/O: Some Insights into I/O Profiling and Debugging

My agenda also has some general purpose topics like Ajax Push and Comet as well as Central Event Processing (CEP) which might be useful in the future. So we will see about these.