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The second day of JavaOne started with a refreshing jog towards the Golden Gate bridge. Thanks to Rune for dragging me out at 0630 for this, it was truly worth it.
We decided to skip the Oracle general session in favor of some breakfast, but the jog ended up making us so late, we barely made the first sessions after the general session.
I was lucky enough to get some fruit and a croissant at Moscone Center just in time to catch the Script Bowl. This was a wonderfully exiting contest between some of the main developers of the different scripting languages that run on the Java Platform, namely Groovy, JRuby, Jython and Scala. Scala as you may know is not really a scripting language, but it can be used for this type of rapid development all the same.
The contest was divided into three rounds where the first task was to develop a twitter client as a desktop app, the second app was to create a web app, and the third was free-form development. The whole contest was judged by the audience via SMS, with the overall victory going to the JRuby guys. Way to go! Part of the reason for their success was that they had used their community to get the apps done, as well as bringing a very flashy app for the free-form round.
After this session I ended up getting Tom Enebo to sit down with me to do some development on JRuby. We couldn’t really find anywhere good to sit down, and ended up sitting in one of the lounging areas with less than perfect wireless access, and thus did not get much done apart from downloading and setting up the latest JRuby trunk on my computer. I guess I’ll have to get by on my own when I get home. Hopefully I’ll have some time to contribute in the coming weeks. Tom (as well as the rest of the JRuby guys) is a very easygoing guy, and I enjoyed spending some time with him and the rest of the guys throughout JavaOne.
After our little coding session, we went to see Ola Bini’s talk entitled JRuby on rails. It was nice for me to see how rails apps could be run on the JVM with for instance the Glassfish server. Gives an idea of a good way to make use of JRuby.
The final session I attended was a session with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almeir on What’s new in AJAX. It was a nice little history lesson in the development of JavaScript and the different frameworks based on it over the years. These two guys are a couple of masters of the art of presentations, and just for that is worth the time to show up.
After the AJAX talk I walked around the pavilion for a bit, and actually bumped into the JavaPosse guys (minus Tor), while I was talking to Pete Moore of Atlassian. They were there to talk to Pete too, so they didn’t have too much time for me, but I did manage to discuss some Scala stuff with Dick and Carl. Turns out we are all going to the ScalaLiftOff unconference on Saturday.
Well that was it for the JavaOne stuff, and I joined Rune and Paul and a couple of other guys at a great steakhouse off Union Square for a big steak meal. Very nice.