I'm at JavaOne today. I skipped it last year but decided to come up and see for myself what is going on with Java these days. I'll post some of my observations throughout the day, my initial one is that it's not that crowded but they do have an air hockey table setup so at least I have that to look forward to.
If you are here, find me and introduce yourself. I'm the guy walking around in the black t-shirt that says "I'm blogging this" on the front (the other option was this one).
By the way, I gave away all my Netweaver for Dummies books. Thanks to Jeff Word for being generous enough to give me a case of them.
Just met with 2 very interesting companies:
- Gluecode is doing open source portal and BPM on the Apache foundation. They are pretty early stage but I liked what I saw in the demo. It's clear they run into SAP/Oracle/Plumtree in the larger accounts, but I think they could do very well in the mid-market segments
- OpenLogic is something I liked right off the bat. One of the big issues with open source development is lifecycle management, namely all the stuff that has to happen with configuration and system administration to ensure that all the different LAMP stuff works together seamlessly in a production environment. This company is tackling that area of lifecycle management. Early stage company but I know there are a couple of investor syndicates looking at them.
I also liked what Wily is doing. We took a look at this when we were digging into Cyanea, I think Cyanea is a better technology because it doesn't rely on bit code insertion, like Wily does, but it's hard to argue with the traction that Wily has gotten in the marketplace. They strike me as having a very solid management team (with the admission that I really have not spent a lot of time with them, so it's all first impression kind of stuff).
Lot's of mobile phone companies here, a surprising number really. The new phones from Siemens look really good, but they feel kind of cheap. I'm down on Nokia these days so I didn't even bother checking them out. Motorola has some nice new handsets, as does Sony-Ericsson. Pantech-Curitel is also here, they are a Korean handset manufacturer with some really nice units, unfortunately their best handsets are CDMA technology and don't have a big U.S. carrier presence. They have a slider phone that blew me away, if it was GSM I would be buying it right now.
The other company that I really like is Gigaspaces, they have a distributed data virtualization layer for grids. This is on the broad theme of on demand that I wrote about last week when I went to the Accel/SNRC Symposium at Stanford.
I think I'm going to head out of here. There is a good amount of activity here, but it pretty much falls into development tools, plug-in app modules (i.e. mapping), Web services mgmt, and mobile platform categories and no single category is a big draw for the crowds. One interesting observation is that the development tools market for open source development is robust, while existing gorillas in that space, e.g. Rational, are not a big factor at all.
Aside from the reality that this is as much a Sun branding event as anything else, I wonder how much value there is in having a Java-specific conference like this. I'll admit that I've never much been into these large conference events anyways, but it does seem valid to suggest that there would be more value in having a series of smaller events that are focused on specific areas, for example, mobile development or services oriented development.
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