After planting the clematis and rosemary in my new garden this weekend, I read the slides from the presentations at the recent JavaOne conference. I think it's wonderful that Sun puts all the slides online after the conference is over. It's something that YAPC tried to do last year and we almost pulled it off. I'm impressed that all the presentations use the same template - looks very impressive. I think they tried to do it at OSCON last year, but I can't find the link. I remember it was a directory keyed by talk number, so it was hard to find anything. I hope it's better this year.
Anyway, I'll try and get to the point. I'm not a regular attendee at conferences - I've only ever been to Perl conferences (let's ignore HIP & HAL for the moment). Granted, I've been to a quite a lot of them, but I don't have any experience of other types of conferences, why is why it was interesting to have a look at the JavaONE slides. The first thing I noticed is that there was a great variety of talks going on: anything from basic stuff up to how the JIT worked, including a lot of application-level stuff (JMS etc.). The slides all look pretty good, short and sweet and all have a final "If there's one thing you should remember from this talk it is ...." slide, which is cute and helpful.
The other thing is that (apart from the Sun engineers) all the speakers work for Java companies and presented talks based on the product they sell. Some of the talks appear to be one long advertisement for their product. Some talks even had demonstrations showing off their product. This follows with the commercialisation of Java, but it is something very different to the Perl world - for example see the upcoming talks at OSCON (or YAPC, but you'd expect that to be less commercialised) this year.
The Perl world is just so much friendly, more community-oriented rather than in-your-face-product-selling oriented. For me as a user, this is a great thing. I can find out more about products by actually downloading them for free from the CPAN than having to go to all the bother of buying boxed software. Of course, it's not all a bad thing - there is much more development going on in Java due to the money flow. Hmmm, I wonder if there is a Java community / blog site like use.perl out there?
I have to go to a JavaONE someday to see what it's like...
You can also find presentations from previous years, going back all the way to 1996.
Hmmm, I wonder if there is a Java community / blog site like use.perl out there?
