Greetings from the JavaOne conference in sunny (or foggy, whichever) San Francisco. I’m sitting in Sun’s “general” session where they’re talking about something called “GlassFish,” which is apparently some sort of new J2EE thingamajiggy. Oh, and look, Sun just open sourced JMS (their messaging queue) and NetBeans (their Java IDE). Neat.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to one of these conferences. I think the last one I went to was Software Development back in ‘97 or ‘98. I don’t remember them being anywhere near this big. There have to be a couple two or three thousand people in this room right now. They’ve got the presenters on a huge PA and up on five screens. It’s like a tent revival for a set of technologies that seem to have a religious following in corporate America.

I’m spending most of today at classes on all those newfangled java technologies — none of which are particularly new for people who have been paying attention — that I’ve been ignoring for the last six or seven years — “Enterprise” java beans, JAX, something from Apache called “Derby.” There’s an hour on distributed caching thrown in there so I don’t get too much new stuff clouding my brain.

(Holy god, they’re making Monty Python jokes. Please kill me now.)

There seems to be a lot of talk about Ajax, web services and other Web 2.0 hoo haa that I wouldn’t think would be so popular in the “enterprise” universe where Java is quite so popular. Huh. Well, I guess it makes sense. I’d just as soon be using web front ends where I currently have Swing applications, and my existing web applications — circa 1998 — could definitely stand to be freshened up. Cool.

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