JavaOne: the ‘best of the rest’ awards
If you’ve been digging into ZDNet.co.uk’s coverage of JavaOne in its entirety by now you’ll know that alongside news, there has also been show blogs (such as this one), video content, technical session overviews, Q&As and a variety of images to view taken at the event itself.
To really earn a couple of hours off tomorrow for a walk down to Fisherman’s Wharf and a ropey old ten dollar boat ride around Alcatraz before the evening bash with Smash Mouth playing live – I thought I’d put out a few extra notes that haven’t made it into our core reports so far. For my own amusement mainly, I thought these “extras” could each be awarded a mention in a special prize category of my own design.
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Best use of ‘vendor-speak’ soundbite:
"Everybody communicates in their own way," said James Mustarde, director of corporate marketing, Twisted Pair Solutions. "Like individuals, companies leverage different combinations of technology to achieve their communications requirements. Fortunately, today's Unified Communications solutions are enabling businesses to unify these disparate technologies into a single platform for increased user productivity.”
Best use of ‘try too hard’ press release:
Britney Spears beats out Paris Hilton in Open Source Code Popularity – Code search company Krugle’s story was based around a list of top Java queries that developers world-wide have submitted during the last month at Krugle.com, as well as the number of times various celebrity names are included in the billions of lines of open source code the company tracks. As for distinctly non-Java searches uncovered by Krugle management, “Knuth” returned the highest number of hits in honour of leading computer scientist and ‘father of algorithm analysis’ Donald Knuth, far outstripping Satan in a close second place. Next on the list, George Bush was edged out Britney Spears, with both dominating the fifth-ranked Fidel Castro – all of whom were behind Paris Hilton who rounded out the bottom of the rankings.
Best example of a hardware company trying to position itself as a software company to coincide with JavaOne:
AMD made much of it the fact that it says it has armed the developer community with the tools, resources and hardware-assisted technology they need to develop software more easily. The company has announced a specification for software parallelism to help a managed code environment (like Java) run more efficiently. It has also provided a new plug-in called “Code Sleuth” that provides the Eclipse community with increased performance management and monitoring of Java software code.
(This is a bit unfair of me; Intel talks on software a lot too of course and had a huge booth here at the show – but you get the spin idea I hope.)
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Picture source: courtesy of the Moscone Center
Best middleware announcement (in a supporting role):
Red Hat used JavaOne this week to announce the release of JBoss Operations Network (ON) 2.0, an integrated middleware management platform that it says simplifies application development, testing, deployment and monitoring. Red Hat’s Katrinka McCallum was quoted as saying, “Our customer base is getting more sophisticated and specialised within their IT operations environments when it comes to middleware management."
Best pressroom sandwich:
Wednesday’s roast beef with onion jam on ‘tiger bread’ with mayo and French’s mustard. Best enjoyed with Mountain Dew fizzy pop.
Best attendee quote:
Richard Foxworthy, student from nearby San Carlos, California.
“JavaOne has been great for me as a student, it’s really interesting and I have learned a lot. The only problem I’ve had is with sessions that have been more technical than I had thought they might be from the way they were described in the show handbook and guide. It would be great if the presenters asked the room what the spread of competency is on the subject they are about to talk on before they kick off so that they can perhaps tailor what they say slightly on each occasion.”
Most insightful analyst quote:
“The world is going multi-core, but parallel programming skills are thin on the ground. The market is slow to adopt new programming models and some of the traditional parallel programming tools are (possibly unfairly) seen as old hat,” said John Barr, research director with The 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, in his report. “Pervasive Software's development of DataRush – a Java framework for highly parallel, data-intensive applications – could be in the right place at the right time.”
Best geek giveaway:
James Gosling (all hail the father of Java) firing t-shirts from a giant rubber band catapult at the audience in the day one keynote session.
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No really, he did, look at the picture. I can’t top that or say any more really.
So I won’t.