The first day of JavaOne 2004 has not finished yet but like every year the main focus areas are already clear.

Continuing from last year the theme Ease Of Development for J2EE is clearly evolved in some drastic changes to specs like EJB 3.0 and JDBC 4.0. Annotations is the @keyword.

There is clearly a comeback of the client side of the Java Platform, both in J2SE and J2EE, I just struggled to get through a line of thousands of people to get into the JSF session of Craigh MacLanahan. Even on the J2ME side some changes are made to enhance user experience.

A new concept since this year is the seperation of keynotes in between vendors Every major sponsor has their own keynote session, unlike previous years when all vendors' presentations were blended in the general keynote. This sometimes lead to interesting verbal fights between competitors.
Obviously Sun takes the larger part of the sessions and this permits them to also show more products, like the newly available Java Studio Creator, which was announced to be free.... if you take a 99$ subscription.

The sessions are kept quite technical - as far as I have witnessed already- a continuity from last year, code samples are provided and products are kept out.

The Pavilion with vendors is similar in size as last year, which suffered big time on the economic recession. Not many people are on the showfloor during the sessions which is a good sign for the quality of the sessions or maybe to do with the limited number of vendors handing out t-shirts.

Day 2 of JavaOne kicked off with the traditional keynote of Scott McNeally.

There was a special section on JUGs, he mentioned there are about 550 JUGs in the world.
Some magazine ( I need to find out which one ) actually created a worldmap with all JUGs.

Scott mentioned 4 JUGs, one of which was BeJUG !!! ( he actually called us BeBeJUG )

If you get the chance to see the keynote on the site, you will hear 2 guys cheering when he mentioned
BeJUG. Just be reassured it is just Stephan and me.

It looks like several Tigers are out there to eat you!

The J2SE-version-5-Tiger will be released around the Q4 of this year with many new features like annotations, generics, auto-boxing, varargs, for-each, enums, static imports, simplified threading, etc. There's a beta2 available today. However it looks like the J2SE 1.5 books are still being printed...

The other Tiger I'm (also) really looking forward to, is the next Mac OS X version following Panther. Yesterday Steve Jobs gave a great keynote during the Apple WWDC2004 conference which also takes place this week in San Francisco. Next to the over 150 new features, Tiger (which will get released around Q2 2005) will also support our own Java Tiger.

If Apple can combine the (highly speculated) G5 PowerBooks with the Tiger release I'm more than happy to throw my Dell out of the Window
While I'm planning to switch my hardware, I should probably also think to switch my wheels. At the JavaOne exhibition hall you can see a BMW 645i sports scar which has an embedded wide LCD screen, by Siemens VOD, completely written in Java. Next to that you can now also iPOD enable your BMW (or Mini) for a couple of hundred Euros... unfortunately only the models from 2002 onwards can get iPod enabled.... damn.
Maybe I should switch my "mobile" hardware sooner ?!

Java is really everywhere!

Stephan