Jazoon 07: wrap-up

Just back home from Jazoon, and also back to work and to everydays hassles 🙁 . Also, the time has come to make a comprehensive evaluation of the conference.

All in all, I must say I came back with a good impression of the conference, which was quite well arranged and brought along a whole bunch of interesting topics and issues. Wanna know why? Click on the link below for the full story!

Being quite busy preparing my own speeches together with Fabrizio, there wasn’t much time left for following the technical discussions. However, I did manage to pull off a bunch of them during the conference:

1. 07/26: “What makes NetBeans the best IDE for Java ME Development? by Fabiola Gallegos and Lukas Hasik
2. 07/26: “Semantic Mash-ups using RDF, RSS and Microformats” by Dean Allemang
3. 07/27: “JavaFX Script – Declarative GUI Programming Language for the Java Platform” by Anatoly Fomenko and Greg Murray
4. 07/27: “Carrying the Enterprise in your Pocket” by Brian Leonard
5. 07/27: “Integrated Profiling” by Gregg Sporar

07/27: “Integrated Profiling” by Gregg Sporar

This conference brought up a few interesting topics:

• JavaFX. Seemingly presented for the first time in Europe, here comes the new way of developing interactive interfaces. Mainly billed as a direct competitor to Macromedia Flash, I must admit I didn’t find it so convincing at first glance. It’s a brand new technology, so we’ll se how it stacks up against its competitors.
• Semantic Web. Of course it ain’t no big surprise, since the concept has been around for a while now. I personally like the idea very much of promoting data sharing and search to a higher (and more powerful) level of abstraction. Indeed, it looks like the foundation of next-generation web applications.
• Mashups. The term itself is really confusing. But Wikipedia helped me out: a mashup is “website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience”. Well, I quite get the picture now: although I am no expert in the field, it sounds interesting.
• NetBeans. My opinion will probably seem a little biased, but in fact there’s no denying the platform has made huge progress in the last two years. It’s made it easier to build rich-client applications, and the upcoming version 6.0 will sport a lot of interesting features, e.g. a very powerful profiler. Furthermore, it looks like a viable option for Java ME development, although I don’t really like the idea of the preprocessor for targeting different platforms. I reminds me of the dreadful times back when I had a heck of a time fighting against the C/C++ #defines.

A more detailed coverage of the technical topics that came up at Jazoon by Moritz Petersen can be found at this link.

Also, I must say I’m happy with our performance as speakers at the conference. In spite of some problems with the first software demo and an unattended BOF, the turnout at the technical session was quite satisfactory, and the timing of both the technical session and the second demo was very good. I hope our audience wasn’t too bored after all!

Now let’s talk about the conference organization itself. On the whole it was very good: after all, could it ever be otherwise in Switzerland? I also had a good time at the social events. Too bad the weather screwed up the planned boat trip around the lake. Still, there is some room for improvement in some respects:

1. Probably, too many parallel tracks caused the attendance (and the level of attention) at the technical sessions to fragment somewhat.
2. Too many software demos, which probably were also regarded as very advertisement-oriented. Which is not true IMHO, except for a few cases.
3. The BOF scheduling and organization definitely has to be completely rethought. The BOF proposers, including myself, were not notified about their BOFs being approved (fortunately, I got to know out BOF had been approved only by chance while surfing the Jazoon website). And last but not least, they can’t be scheduled that late in the night. This is not JavaOne where 10K participants live there 24×7.

On the whole it was an exciting and rewarding experience. That’s why I look forward to coming next year, hoping for the conference to grow even better in quality and turnout!