adam bien's blog

JavaOne 2014 Afterglow and Feedback 📎

This year JavaOne officially started with a technical keynote in the Moscone center. There were no great, breaking news, but in an open ecosystem it is hard to keep anything secret.The keynote was a bit too formal and the most interesting part was postponed to the community keynote at Thursday.

Unofficially JavaOne started with the NetBeans Party at Saturday which was crowded and a perfect place to ask NetBeans questions or give feedback to the engineers.

The technical content was excellent. I spent 14h at the first both days (8 A.M - 10 P.M.) and really enjoyed all sessions. There was appreciation event at Wednesday (which I did not attended and preferred hacking in hotel). No BOFs were delivered at Wednesday or Thursday.

The community keynote at Thursday was excellent:

  1. James Weaver @JavaFXpert was a great moderator. Professional, funny and engaging.
  2. Intel joins OpenJDK
  3. @johanvos ports JavaFX on android and wins Duke Choice Award
  4. RoboVM presents JavaFX on iOS
  5. Johan Vos and RoboVM will join forces and deliver Java 8 (JavaFX) with Lambdas on both platforms. http://javafxports.org
  6. http://dukescript.com (a Java -> JavaScript bridge) also wins the Duke Choice awards
  7. James Gosling explains the early days of Java.
  8. There was a twitter Q&A with top engineers. #1qa was top 7 trending hashtag in USA.
  9. The JavaOne video is nice.

Also the JavaFX related sessions were very popular. The session Productive JavaFX was very well attended. I got lots of specific questions from the project, so JavaFX seems to gain momentum on desktop. I got the same feedback from other speakers.

JavaOne was really good, there was no dead time, content was compressed and the attendees very passionated. There were also more attendees than last year. I got lots of questions between the sessions. The organization was good, the food was better than last and in Parc 55 there was always enough coffee. Only the Starbucks at Hilton was constantly overloaded...

Check my twitter account for pictures: https://twitter.com/AdamBien.

The only suggestion: BoFs at Wednesday would be nice as an option for the appreciation event. Also I missed more sessions delivered by Oracle speakers--I would like to hear more from the core Java / JavaEE committers.

In case my sessions get accepted -- see you next year!