Today, we attended the Sun Tech Days Conference at the Makati Shangrila. Aside from the great food and freebies, I enjoyed the whole experience. There were several things I learned during the second day of the 3-day conference. Here’s to recap what I learned and observed:
- Java 6 has some nice features including Scripting Language Support (JSR 223) and Web Service Integration. I agree that these 2 features are very common and should be part of the standard Java. I’m not sure about JDBC 4.0; with the success of JPA, JDBC might not be that useful anymore.
- Grails is cool, but not necessarily great. I think it still needs improvement to be able to compete in the enterprise, if at all possible. My main concern with template codes is “customizability”. But it’s still cool.
- Sun admitted their problems with Java 6, such as slow start-up and large codebase. I think this is a good sign for the future of Java.
- Netbeans has improved since I switched to Eclipse three years ago. It supports a ton of platforms/frameworks and has a lot of productivity tools. I believe Netbeans is probably worth revisiting.
- Half of the conference attendees are going to the Enterprise track, which means there is more demand for web applications development rather than desktop (Swing, SWT) or system administration.
- The “new” technologies that the speakers discussed were the same technologies two years ago. We have been already using these technologies (such as Ajaz, JPA, and ESB) in our projects. Either Sun didn’t do a good job in looking for resource persons, or Ideyatech is just updated with the latest technology! (The latter is most probably true… hehe) Anything else new?
- Open-source is confusing – everyone else wanted to be the best platform/framework, and developers are confused which one to use. Even Sun promotes several conflicting/competing technologies – Seam vs. Grails vs. JSF, JDBC vs. JPA, GlassFish vs. JWS. With the myriad of platforms available, which one works best?
The conference was way too crowded, it took me 30 minutes in line to get lunch and coffee. There weren’t enough seats on some rooms because most people seem to be more interested on Enterprise Track (Grails, JPA, etc), rather than Solaris. And what’s even worse is that some of the speakers can’t even speak English very well. I guess these events were meant more for marketing and networking, rather than sharing and obtaining new technologies.
2 thoughts on “Sun Tech Days 2007-2008”
Thank you
Good to hear from you about Sun Tech Days.
I am planning to attend Sun Tech Days 09, hope to have the same experience as you had this time too.