So after our 16 hour flight, together with Robin Mulkers and Gergard Maas, we're back in San Francisco to celibrate the 10th birthday of the Java Language, platform, and way of life! It was a nice surprise to see that Sun finally has chosen to use Java smartcards for their conference badges, a "primiere" I was thinking of introducing this year at JavaPolis aswell, this means we'll have to come with something more interesting... just joking or am I ?! The JavaOne smarcard needs to be entered in the SunRay if you want to browse, I wonder if they log my browsing activities ?! This morning during our breakfast at the Handlery hotel we were joined by Rod Johnson who's staying, together with Juergen Hoeller, in the same hotel. These are the nice side-effects of being transparent about your JavaOne travel and living plans. Rod told us about a nice Spring Framework announcement during the JavaOne Conference. However he asked me to wait with a blog post one minute after the announcement, so keep your eyes open on the BeJUG news page. I can give you a hint: if you open the JavaOne conference bag and read the BEA insert it says "BEA is embracing the merging application frameworks and tooling with eclipse-based tooling in BEA WLS 9.0, Aspect Oriented Programming and integration with Struts, Beehive and..... the Spring Framework". This means being a BEA European Technical Director makes (again) sense !! Dieter, the BeJUG portal is again compliant with the BEA strategy I really hope other Java vendors will follow this same route towards simplified J2EE development, I know JCS does It's also interesting to see that IBM has been added as a last-minute sponsor in the conference eratta. Some new companies on the list are JustSystem (Gold CoSponsor), Axalto, FairIsaac (anybody knows what these companies do ?).

It's probably more expensive than JavaPolis sponsoring because JavaOne this year only has 12 companies on to sponsor list, excluding JBoss and MicroSoft (which is a surprise to me).

So this afternoon we'll do some shopping, watch the San Francisco gay parade (maybe see some 'famous' Java people?), take the cablecar to the bay area and this evening propably go to the Stars Wars movie... let JavaOne begin !!

-Stephan