JavaOne…more thoughts

This is now my second trip to SFO for JavaOne. After being at LotusSphere in March (where IBM announced Notes 8 Beta), I’ll have to say this is the better conference to attend. I’m also going to the Rational Software Developer Conference in Orlando in June, and I have my doubts about it.

JavaOne has a much stronger focus on the technology and and less on the product. RSDC and LotusSphere are truly marketing events. JavaOne is a technology event. Yes, there are cool products and demos to be seen at both IBM events. But since when does IBM do a call for papers?

I’m sitting down at the moment waiting for the GlassFish BOF to start. I’m very impressed with GlassFish and NetBeans thus far. The NetBeans 6 beta is just killer. In fact I think its much better than my hyper expensive edition of Rational Software Architect on Linux. I feel brainwashed by IBM at this point. My tasks for the coming weeks are to dig a litter deeper into the technologies I’ve learned this week just to ensure I’ve dug through the marketing hype.

One lesson I’ve learned is how I can install NetBeans on Ubuntu via the Multiverse repository. Its SOOOO much easier than installing anything from the Rational Development Platform, and strongly competitive. At least on Ubuntu. Hey…IBM…did you know Ubuntu was the number one distribution??? Do you know your installers are for RPM distributions only (Red Hat, Suse, Fedora, etc). Get with the program. Sun is beating you to it!