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Sun has Mojo!
February 05, 2008
Yes - I know it's been quiet here for a while, for which I apologise to both my readers. I'll hopefully be more active over the next while.
This is a brief update on the Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days event which I was lucky enough to attend a couple of weeks ago in rainy (yes, rainy!) Santa Clara. Hosted by Sun, and organised by Terrence Barr and Roger Brinkley (and supporting team from Sun), this was the first time such a gathering of the Mobile/Embedded Java community had been attempted by Sun.
And it worked! Several hundred people attended, maybe 200 or so in person, and another couple of hundred joined in remotely, via the excellent ustream.tv platform. Check here for videos from the two days. James Gosling kicked off the proceedings, and from there on it was quite a mix of detailed technical and community sessions covering everything from 3D to Robots to Security to the notion of a Developer alliance.
Highlights for me included some detailed coverage on SunSpots, the embedded hardware/software wireless sensor platform from Sun, including the announcement that they have open-sourced the Squawk VM; the TrackBot talk and demo (uses SunSpots); the presentations on JXTA, now with new proxyless ME implementation, and the general updates on tools, phoneME and all the other goodies coming down the tracks.
All in all - quite a lot to digest, and in my case, I had to miss a lot of Day 2 due to other work commitments. All the slides are available at the site, and Terrence has a good wrap-up here.
Half the value of any event like this is really the interaction with the people at the event, and this one really delivered. The attendees were mostly practitioners in the wireless/embedded area, and so the quality of questions and general banter at the show was very high. I also got to meet C. Enrique Ortiz, whom I've wanted to meet for a long time, as he's written pretty much the best articles on JSR82 and Java/Bluetooth over the years.
My talk was on "Past, Present and Future of JSR82, the Java/Bluetooth APIs". It was well-attended, and seemed to go well (always hard to tell).
All in all, an excellent event, and I look forward to the next one. I also got a sense of a certain "buzzed-ness" around the Sun people there; they were upbeat, passionate about their projects, and pretty excited about the potential for the new developments in the Java mobile / embedded arena. For a company that's had its trials and tribulations over the recent years, this was great to see. I look forward to seeing how things turn out for Java and Sun in 2008.
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