Unfortunately, I have to agree with everything Asad has said; this was my 5th JavaOne and may well be my last. I have noticed a consistent deterioration in the quality of the shows (AND the parties!) since the first JavaOne in 1995. The only things I got out of this JavaOne, besides the hassles, were
1. SDK 5.0 previews; 2. StudioCreator discount subscription; 3. Opportunity to personally meet many of the authors and fellow listers I've chatted with over the years; 4. There were an abundance of very pretty blonde females this year....coincidence with the quality of the show?
I felt that most of the sessions (I went everyday from 0830 - 1800) were little more than PR hype or bad PowerPoint presentations sans meaningful code (at one session "covering" a generic implementation of a DAO, the speaker intentionally skipped over the source code in order to finish his speech in time!). I think I speak for most, if not all, of us when I say, "Give me the source, or don't bother."
By the time the BOFs started at 1900, I was too tired to bother, so I just returned to my hotel and read Brett McLaughlin's and David Flanagan's "Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook" (O'Reilly 2004), which was much more interesting than anything "learned" in any of the sessions. Especially the general sessions - what a collosal waste of time.
And I want to emphasize Asad's complaints about the food and the gestapo. Further, the Exposition was a pale comparison of former years, with Sun dominating the booths with 30-40 percent of the floor space, and wouldn't give me a lousy t-shirt because, even though I have been a member of the Sun Dev Network since 2000, I never received their stupid plastic card, so I got one and then was told you can't have a t-shirt until you bring the card back to a subsequent JavaOne. HOW FUCKING CHEAP IS THAT???
I think I'll be attending a REAL developers' conference next year.
Mark
Asad Faizi wrote:
I don't know what all your experience are with this JavaOne, but I found it a terrible waste of money and time - it really, really sucked. The contents was much below par. The only useful information I got out of JavaOne was the preview of what is coming in J2SE and J2EE; but I did not need to spend $2,700.00 and waste four days of my life for that - I could have just bought a book.
The management was horrible - terrible food, no coffee, tea, or even water, and extremely rude people on the floor. I saw one of these "watch-guards" practically wrestle away the second Pepsi can from one attendee who dared to pick up the extra can of soda with the lunch. Two out of four days the food was all gone by the time I made it to the lunch area. I also hated being scanned five hundred times in a day.
Well, I think this pretty much was my last JavaOne. Too bad, I have been going to everyone of them so far.
Asad Faizi
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