JavaOne 2014 Preview: NetBeans Day, IoT and Rock 'n' Roll

It's time again for the annual JavaOne gathering of Java jocks in San Francisco for a week of drink…I mean, learning and networking. I kid, but that's because the anxiety over how well this touchstone event would weather its assimilation by Oracle OpenWorld has largely dissipated. For all intents and purposes, JavaOne continues to survive with its identity intact.

The primary venues for this year's event, which runs from Sept. 28 through Oct. 2, are the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the Parc 55 Wyndam, but some related events are scheduled for the Nikko Hotel. (My feet ache already.) The annual Strategy Keynote is set for Sunday afternoon at the north hall of the Moscone Center, the event's former home. The usual suspects will be on hand: Georges Saab, Peter Utzschneider, Cameron Purdy, and John Duimovich. Mark Reinhold will again give the Technical Keynote. The Community Keynote is set for Thursday morning.

I'm especially excited about the NetBeans Community Day 2014 (Sunday, September 28), which throws a spotlight on one of the least talked about and yet most popular Java IDEs. Rather than individual presenters, the NetBeans Day sessions will take the form of moderated panels of experts, including some genuine Java rockstars. The father of Java himself, James Gosling, will be there, moderating a panel focused on how they use the editors, debuggers, and profilers from NetBeans (which Gosling has called his favorite IDE) to program and interact with devices. (Expect some insights into Gosling's recent passion: sea-going robots.)

NetBeans Community Day has a lineup of six panel sessions offering real-world stories and demos of NetBeans new features in action, presentations about developing Java EE apps with Maven, talks about working with free Java tools, and a discussion about teaching with free Java tools. Session presenters include speakers from Jelastic, ZeroTurnaround, Codename One, VMware, QAware, Boeing, Kodewerk and JClarity, among others.

Among the rumored announcements I'm the most curious about is some news expected from the Eclipse Foundation about an Open IoT Stack for Java. The Foundation has been working for a couple of years now on its Internet of Things initiative, first focusing on M2M, and then expanding to include the broader IoT. The Foundation will have a booth at this year's show, where reps will be demoing some of the projects from that initiative, Ian Skerrett promised in a recent blog post. He also listed a number of Eclipse-related talks scheduled for this year's show. Lots of IoT stuff in there, but also Java 8, JavaFX, Eclipse Luna, the cloud and Java EE.

If you needed proof that IoT has graduated from buzzword to serious software category, look no further than all the sessions in the JavaOne IoT track. It's a long list, covering topics ranging from OSGi-based architectures to Gosling's robots. Need more? IoT will figure prominently in James Weaver's community keynote on Thursday, he said in a short conference page Q&A. Weaver is a Java developer, author, and consulting member of Oracle's Technical Staff. He has, the post observed, "a passion for Java, rich-client applications, and the Internet of Things (IoT)."

I'm also interested in what I think is a new addition to the conference floor: a Meet the Experts area, which was mentioned in a recent post on the Glassfish blog: The Aquarium. It's described as "a designated space in the JavaHub where most of the Specification Leads will be present at a dedicated time." Could be a mob scene; could be a golden opportunity to get some face time. Oracle's Java EE Evangelists and Heather VanCura from the JCP will also be there.

One obvious advantage of the Oracle connection is the "attendee appreciation" events, which this year include geezer rockers Aerosmith, millennials fav Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, and the Brit band Spacehog.

Remember: learning and networking.

Posted by John K. Waters on September 24, 2014