Javapolis 2006

 
I had a smooth drive
to Antwerp. Not
much traffic and metropolis is easy to reach from the motorway. After my pass
was cut and stamped I was in and had a nice bag full of goodies and info. The
venue becomes bigger every year, but still doesn’t look crowded. New this
year is a wireless lan, even in the conference rooms. It did not work flawless
yet, but when I could connect it was very convenient.

I’m able to visit
Javapolis for four days, so there is a lot to see. Looking at the Conference
Guide you can spot the hot topics. Rich Internet Applications is one of them. Ajax, Flex and Swing are
competing for attention. Adobe is attracting a lot of attention towards Flex
with a big stand, giveaways and three presentations. On top of that every
visitor found a flex demo disk in his bag. Romain Guy is competing the Sexy
Flex with Filty Rich Clients on Wednesday. This is strictly not web technology,
but is a competing with RIA’s on some areas. Romain Guy can show you some
amazing effects with Swing. Regarding this also consider visiting Bruno
Schaeffer and Marc Domenig on Wednesday with their talk about "Beyond Ajax". Ajax talks are hard to
miss. Every day there are several talks about this technology.

SOA is also still
worth its own category. I’m definitelygoing to attend the talk on Wednesday by Guy
Nizpaz with the inspiring title: “Everybody talks about SOA but how the hell do
I build the damn thing in a high performance-stateful environment?”

On Thurday I have to
choose between a Keynote by Duncan Mills and my colleague Wouter van Reeven who
will do a lab on the OpenOffice.org SDK. I guess I will be seeing Wouter a lot
more in the future so … I’m probably attending his lab J

I’m very much looking
forward to this week. Lot’s of information to
suck up. I’ll be blogging throughout the event to keep you up to date with my
findings.