The End

Sun CEC 2007 is over.
The only thing left is to pick up the sorry peices of my body and transport it to the airport Thursday morning.
Thanks to all organizers, speakers and colleagues that made this unforgettable.
This has been a very different experience at a very different place.
Is this town for real?

Software All-Hands

The SW practice session started with a SGD/SunRay session followed by a presentation and discussion around what is missing in Suns portfolio for us to be able to build solutions and how we need to approach customer requirements on these solutions?
Sorry, but I have a little hard to relate to the discussion taking place here.
A lot of vulture heads in the audience seem to think the same. Are they all in OEM?

Final Day

This dry desert air is starting to dry me out. Both skin and body needs lot of liquid and lotion. (They may be putting something strong in the drinks here as well. What do I know?)
Half a day to go with SW All-Hands and Closing Session. Unfortunately no more tech sessions. I've seen a lot of good ones, and missed some promising ones as well. Luckily enough they will be available online in the near future. From what I understand, that will be multimedia style à-la JavaOne.
So, in the name of eco responsibility; don't print them out - watch them on the screen (if any SRs happen to read this).

What happens in Vegas - Stays in Vegas!

Sin City night @ the Coyote Ugly

The staff is up at the bar and the eyes are standing out like ping-pong balls on Rannee, Andee and Stillee.

El Guitarra

You all know it's impossible not to bring anything expensive and bulky back from the US each time.
Last night I went down to Guitar Center to get an axe for my brother. The directive was to get a black or white one with good look and feel.
I actually spent 2.5 hours trying out the entire store. Since I'm a Les Paul guy myself the final choice was between these three Epiphones.
I actually gave Ibanez, Schecter and Jackson a chance, but in this price range they kinda suck.
I was standing there playing with earphones connected to a Marshall when this sales guy stuck a note under my nose with a big smile.
"Bollocks, didn't I turn off the speaker?"
No, the note read: "You're the smartest cust I've ever seen!"
If you've ever been into a guitar store you'd understand him; lots of self-claimed guitarists and drummers rocking off in every corner.
I guess that shows the difference between shy swedes and loud americans. :)
So, I finally went for the white one plus a trainer with digital effects and mp3 support to play along with your favourite songs.

Java ME Calendar Sync to Sun Calendar Server

Stefano De Toni from Sun Italy demoed his cal sync solution at the Pavilion.

It contains two different modules:
1 - Conversion from Palm Datebook to iCalendar format for one click backups with cal-emea from the dock. All written in Java.

2 - For a two way sync from any MIDP 2.0 device he has developed a calendar midlet that sync with the edge cal.

To extend the integration with the device further Stefano will implement the PIM APIs to be able to populate the midlet from the device cal. For full synchronization with the device there is a limitation in many PIM implementations that prevents the midlet from reading the "last modified" attribute.

I would like to see a head-less midlet doing the end-to-end sync between the residential cal and calc-emea. Or, even just the backup feature for the devices not supporting the "last modified" attribute.

5 Killer Sun Developer Tools Demos

I will give you the basics of this session and you can check it out when it comes online if you want more. Or ask Connors that attended as well.

So, what do we do to improve the reputation of our tools?

This was a walk-through of news in NetBeans 6.

1 - Java Editing Made Simple
* Smart Code Completion is improved witch also will give you constructions of commodity code depending on context.

* Instant Renaming will change all occurrences of for example var names.

* Different high-lighting depending of the type of variable; underlines, italic, etc.

* You can easily detach different modules from the base GUI, e.g., the Editor.

2 - GUI programming
* Easy to create object bindings.

* Localization
Changing if the language reflected directly in the visual designer.

3 - Java Profiling
Built in profiler with a heap walker for performance analysis. easy to get to the code that is causing the symptoms.

4 - Java EE Development
Easy creation of WebServices,EJBs and persistency (using the Java Persistence API).

5 - Ruby on Rails support with full code completion.

The NetBeans demos can be found at http://netbeans.org/kb/index.html

Customers can buy support for NetBeans at http://netbeans.org/kb/support.html

Day 2 - General Session

Eco responsibility with Dave Douglas.
Data centers world wide is responsible for 200M tons of CO2 per year. This number is doubled every 5 years.
Dave was announcing http://OpenEco.org, which is an open source project of a tool for measuring eco gases for an organization. The initiative is funded by Sun.
Question from the the visualizer: Talking about eco responsibility, why is the CEC in Las Vegas?
Unanswered from the stage, though.
Do you measure how iwork users save? It shifts to my house.
A: measurements are being done. Why not sponsor residential solar panels?

Jonathan Schwartz
No suit and tie today! Always enjoyable to listen to Jonathan.
He presented an interesting division of the market and opportunities into how our customers look at their IT strategies. Sun will be investing in companies that see IT as a weapon, not companies that see IT as a cost. We're happy to take their purchase order, but our focus must be where the growth is.
Hypothetical question from Jonathan with regards to our CPU competitiveness:
What if Niagaras could execute x86 instructions?

Sushi Night

We had a team dinner last night at the Hamada. Great Japanese atmosphere with these low tables. You also had to take off your shoes before entering the dining area, like to a Dojo. Imagine 20 pair of feet released after 12 hours walking... The sushi was delicious, though.

JavaFX - Scripting, Mobile and Beyond

Mostly old news
One good thing though that was new to me is the JavaFX Script compiler. It will compile the JavaFX code to byte code. Find it at http://openjfx-compiler.dev.java.net

Claims to be up to 50X faster running the byte code than using the current interpreter mode.

A demo was shown how to recreate a Flickr user experience in JavaFX Script using NetBeans.

Next demo was a cool guitar tuner that I absolutely need to lay my hands on.

Standards Driven SOA, SW Integration, Provisioning and Federation

Description of a demo environment for an end-to-end value prop from Sun in the SOA and Identity space.

The demo shows a travel agency - airline - car rental interaction.

Three key business scenarios:
- partner promotion and SSO
- registration
- user administration

The demo environment consist of Portal Server, GlassFish, Access Manager, OpenESB, Java ES, etc.

Demo requests can be sent to ezqual-demo-interest@sun.com

Next Gen of WEB-2.0 ID Aware Architecture

Fulup started with a really good overview of identity as a concept, comparing analogue life identity handling with the digital age.
Key take-away 1: It is not the attributes that are confidential, it's the connections between them. Cmp. name and medical record.
Key take-away 2: the purpose of identity is not authentication, but authorization. Cmp. driver licence.
The rest of the session was describing all the attributes that need to be considered when deploying identity in the WEB-2.0 context, e.g. user consent and federating Identity Providers.

Open ESB in JavaCAPS.next: Defining the future of SOA based Integration Platforms

Technical Session.
Description of the evolution of the integration platform and how it made it into the JavaEE environment. Future will see more "Extensible Suites", meaning a more pluggable architecture.

JBI (JSR 208) core is a message router handling the interacton between composite applications using different Service Engines for deploymentand Binding Components for transport.
OpenESB is an implementation of JBI and includes IDE, runtime and management (NetBeans and GlassFish).
More and more components from OpenESB will make it into JCAPS and JavaCAPS 5.2 will include JBI Runtime.

Day 1 - General Session

This was probably the coolest opening ever!
No question the theme of the week will be "The Shift" - hyper growth opportunities.
Down to Eart again, Dan Berg was announcing the "CE 2.0"
http://cetwo.sfbay/
A new mash-up of all the different tools we live and breath every day. OneStop, CEpedia, NameFinder, etc. And the real good stuff:
It will be on the Edge!

Margaritaville

Went up the strip a bit.
Great drinks, great company, good looking, ehrr, interior. The band is getting better and better, and Bartie is starting to lose it.
It's night life Vegas style.
Born to be wild!

Off Course

Ups and downs as usual. One par and one birdie chip in!
Chilling at the 19th hole with a Margarita.
Looking forward to the welcome reception tonight.
Let the CEC begin!

Golfing

To kill some time between now and a good tech session we decided to go to Angel Park Golf Club.
After a 1000+ kcal brunch at the Big Buffet at Bally's we headed for the course. Vinnie G, me and KH were picked up by Mark in his rental.
Weather seem to be on our side with 85F degrees and moderate winds.
Don't know if it's good or bad for the future to beat Vinnie today.
I'll let you know.

Grand Canyon

19 hours after leaving home we finally arrived to the hotel. We began to meet fellow CEC'ers on the public shuttle from the airport. Guys from Sydney, Australia and Denmark.
At the hotel lobby we stumbled into KH, a colleague from South Korea. Together we went out to the Strip for a bite at the Harley Davidson Café and then finally crashed to bed.
Me and Dan spent Saturday sitting another 10+ hours in a buss taking us to the South Rim of Grand Canyon. A very nice experience including the magnificent Hoover Dam.
Promised myself that the rest of the week will include more exercising and less sitting.
Yeah right...

Flying Preparations

Technorati Profile

So, bags are packed, work is done and I'll soon be off to the airport. As usual I stay awake all night before a trans-atlantic flight to start to get the brain and body accustomed to the new time zone.

I finished off work today by visiting some customers down in Lund, in south of Sweden. Together with some international friends we were walking between customer sites then, suddenly, one of them stopped and gasped in front of the following sign:

"What in Gods name are these guys up to in there? What business are they in?"

For every non-Swedish speaking person it might look like these companies have a special business arrangement with higher authorities. And who knows what technologies they are *really* using to get these radio signals working?

Going to Vegas

Now it's time for the annual Customer Engineering Conference at Sun Microsystems. This year the event takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's going to be nice not to have to go to down town San Francisco for once.

Only drawback is that I will have to hold on really tight to my wallet this time.

I will write down all interesting new technologies and products that will be shown. Mainly on the software side though, since that is the area where I live and breath every day.

The CEC 2007 event will happen from October 7th-10th.