JavaOne delivers gospel

San Francisco — Sun’s first birthday bash for Java had all the trappings of an old-fashioned tent revival. The keynote on JavaOne’s opening day — at 8:30 am — was mobbed by 6,000 seekers. Even the speakers referred to the podium as a pulpit as they exhorted us toward the right path (“Write to independent specs. … Go forth and wire schools.”) and away from darkness (anything but Java). Mostly we heard prophesy (such as “Java classes will replace the OS”).

This quasi-spiritual feeling was both the good and bad part of the conference. The upside: All these Java developers were getting excited by the new technology. In corners, by the food lines, at Starbuck’s — everywhere there were developers meeting face-to-face, talking, learning, and getting new ideas. The downside: Because Java is still in its infancy, there was a lot of vapor and evangelizing. Few products are shipping, much less mature. So we heard a lot of “I have a dream that your toaster will be on the internet.”

Six thousand of us (including those watching via a monitor in an overflow room) saw the opening keynote, in which James Gosling showed off Java’s original prototype machine, Star 7, and talked revolution. Gosling’s revolution involves technology changing the way we do things and us, as developers, building the Internet into society. Referring to the Star 7, he encouraged developers to use “hammer technology.” In 1992, Sun’s “Green Team” essentially took a hammer to all sorts of components and put the pieces together in a totally new way to create Star 7. The message: Take what’s out there already, what we’re offering, whatever you find; put the pieces and parts together and make something the world has never seen before.

The message certainly got people fired up, but it was really a pleasure to hear developers saying things like “Forget applets. I want to make full-featured applications in Java. And I need these tools.” They were taking the vision, making it theirs and acting on it.

There were lots of evangelists, but this event was for the seekers. After the sessions, attendees would approach the speakers with some version or another of “Where can I learn more?” As Sun’s John Gage pointed out, more than 100 different Java books already exist. Developers are dying to learn more and be part of it. Despite the quality of the sessions, they couldn’t fully satisfy the hunger for information that developers feel right now.

Conference sessions

In general, the sessions really were good. The technical level was without a doubt much higher and less vendor- and product-driven than in any other developer’s conference I’ve been to. And since it was a developer’s conference, there was a certain unguardedness that enabled more candid comments and interaction than what’s typically found at shows like Comdex. For example, in the Distributed Computation and Persistence session, Jim Waldo, one of the original designers of CORBA and writer of one of the first ORBs, said of CORBA, “It’s like being the parent of a child who is walking the streets in fishnet stockings. You keep thinking about how much you could have done better.” In the Database Systems and Tools session, the competition between Rob Veitch of Sybase and Joseph Vassallo of Oracle extended into who got how much time on stage and sniping comments.

Around on the exhibit floor, though, the vapor level was high. Given the fact that the alpha version of Java was put out onto the Net only a year ago, that’s not too surprising. I really liked a small company named Thought Inc. that makes class libraries for regular expression searching and similar useful tasks. The products are interesting and useful, but the best thing about them is that these people seem to live by the line “No Vapor.” They wouldn’t tell me anything about upcoming products, only what’s actually available. This was refreshing. Still, they were one of the few with actual product. Many developers found themselves on the floor looking for the tools they need and asking, “Where’s the beef?”

Not that vapor is entirely bad. A case in point is Sun’s announcement of Java Beans — a project aimed at making components available across applications or applets. This would encompass not only Java components, but OpenDoc-compatible and ActiveX components as well. Even though this project is mostly vapor, it gives developers an idea of what the near future will look like. Knowing that there will be wrappers for existing components means that rewriting them in Java isn’t a priority.

As for the show itself, it was well-run. At what must have been an over-capacity crowd, everything flowed smoothly. When Softbank, the conference organizers, realized that the technical sessions were so very popular, they rearranged the room assignments and made sure everyone had the new schedules. They also did a cool thing in designing the show: They sold only one size of booth space at ,000. This model reflects the key role small companies play in the Java world. Over half the people I met were working at startups. These are the folks propelling the revolution, and they all got an equal shot at the same kind of booth. No one was overwhelmed.

At any other conference, the prime culprit for overwhelming would have been Microsoft. But this time, it was clearly a Sun party. Microsoft was there, but had been relegated to a booth in a corner, away from the Sun- Netscape-Borland-Symantec clique. Despite the remote location, Microsoft attracted a substantial crowd for its ActiveX demo.

In the end, JavaOne wasn’t about Sun, or the vendors. It was about the developers. This was as it should be. Acknowledging that, the underlying theme to it all was “go forth and write Java.” I’m definitely not going to miss the next one — I can’t wait to see what all those developers at startups produce.