I will be writing up JavaOne next week, but if one thing felt obvious at Java and CommunityOne its that Sun’s strategy, top-lined by Jonathan, managed by Rich, marketed by Aisling, supported by sacred cow shooters like Jeet Kaul and long time steady hands like Robert Brewin and Dan Roberts is beginning to establish some critical mass. There is a pragmatism at work which is making the company more attractive to a multifarious range of developers. Dan McWeeney presented, and didn’t mention Java: he is all about Ruby On Rails. The people at Java One may not be buyers, but they are learners, and doers. I am not sure I would want to be an exhibitor because the community was out in the sessions, dorking on out scripting languages, open source, and other goodness. The confidence comes from the top. It helps to be in profit. Eclipse plug-ins for Glassfish and so on. Gravity is a force of nature, too. Joyent was on the floor.
Did I go native? For sure. One tends to at JavaOne. It will settle.
One last point on tools – whatever you think of JavaFX, Sun’s new scripting language for rich apps, the fact its going to be GPLd is something to think about. Sometimes you don’t have to have the best tools, but the most passionate development community, to enable co-creation for better outcomes. Flex and Silverlight are many things, but GPL they are not, and I don’t think ever will be.
disclosure: JavaOne was great fun, as ever. Sun provided the resources for our first ever analyst conference, as one of the tracks at CommunityOne, on Monday. Sun is a RedMonk patron. Some of the people on the list above are personal friends. If you’re not on the list don’t feel slighted. I just wanted to call out some change agents.
oh yeah- a mixed bag of developers look like this:
No Comments