JavaOne Keynote

The keynotes for events like JavaOne are usually big on pageantry, big on hype, big on announcements, and big on attendance.  JavaOne 2008's keynote did not disappoint.  Complete with choreographed dance teams, interpretive pantomime, and even break dancing, the pre show entertainment was high on glitz and enticements.  Things really got underway when John Gage, Chris Melissinos, and James Gosling took the stage with the infamous t-shirt launching sling-shot and began to hurl collector edition t-shirts to the crowd.

Higher Purpose Java
James and John introduced us to several initiates ongoing at "Pervasive" JavaOne this year around green processes and tracking resource uses. Sensors are in place all over the Moscone center to track the power usage in every room, the CO2 footprint of the rooms, and the bio-temperature of the room. In addition, the RFID tags in all of the attendee badges are tracking movement in and out of all rooms. All of these sensors are tied into a dashboard of reporting metrics about the conference. The goals are straightforward. Apply technology in new ways to improve humanity in some way. The challenge was delivered to seek out ways to improve our world, our footprint, our companies footprint. Wherever you can make a difference. Contribute!

Demonstration Time
Rich Green, Executive Vice President, Software, soon entered the stage and shared more of the vision for the show this year and also kicked off with many vendor guests as well as several announcements.  Ian Freed with Kindle, Rikko Sakaguchi with Sony Ericsson, and lots on the Glassfish, JavaFX, NetBeans, MySQL, and Project Hydrazine.  Several demos by each speaker and several went awry.  One of the more interesting ones was a Facebook application called LiveConnect that links together all of your friends and chats from the various platforms (Flickr, Flockr).  It was also a dragable and mobile app(FX Mobile) which was interesting.

Keep on Rockin' in the Free World
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President, came out and talked more about the vision and eventually introduced an "impartial" third party to help validate that Java is changing the world.  Neil Young was on hand to show us all his life-long anthology project and how Java technology on Blu-ray disc has now made presenting his life story possible.  In addition (and to tie things together) he is also partnering with an auto tracking device to enable tracking his location, energy consumption, emissions, etc, live from his website.

All in all it was quite a rousing Keynote.  Let the 75 hours of JavaOne begin!

Watch the highlights from the keynote presentation here:
http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/sessions/general/index.jsp

-mw