We always seem to have exceptional weather when we’re on vacation. “There’s never so much rain in August here,” local people tell us. Or, “Normally in this time of the year, we have 1 meter of snow, easily,” when we’ve come for winter sports. And now, when the average temperature in the South-West of France has been about 10 degrees Celsius in the last few weeks, M. and I arrived in a landscape full of fog and ice; and just this week that we’re here, all records have been broken. So glad we could help!
The silence that is here all the time is now over-silenced by a thick blanket of fog and a white layer of ice crystals over the fields. It doesn’t matter, because inside, there’s a fire in the fireplace, cheese is on the table and the wine is uncorked. Let the feast begin!
BEA’s Bill Roth (vp of the BEA Workshop Business Unit) hinted at JavaPolis and later in his blog and a LogicCMG blog at the possibility of WebLogic server supporting other languages than Java, like PHP or Ruby. I think this is an interesting idea. If, for instance, Ruby or Rails applications could be deployed to a WebLogic server, maybe you could use data sources or JMS queues from within Ruby code, or even call EJBs. You could profit from WebLogic’s scalability. Another advantage I see is that with BEA ‘supporting’ Ruby, it would be much easier to use Ruby in a corporate environment (that is, if they use BEA in the first place). BEA, bring it on!
(Note that I’m silently ignoring the mention of PHP here. Mentioning PHP and Ruby together does not do justice to Ruby; too many people I speak already think Ruby is just another PHP variant. I think BEA would actually lose credibility if they were to support PHP.)
In Thursday’s keynote, JavaPolis founder Stephan Janssen asked whether JavaPolis should grow even bigger, and because of that, move to a bigger location. According to the official site this year over 2100 people attended the conference. I don’t think there’s a clear answer to Stephan’s question. JavaPolis had a very friendly, cosy atmosphere; I never had the feeling there were 2100 people around. All the stands were well accessible, there was always a seat left even in the most popular sessions. Maybe 2100 is just right. On the other hand, if JavaPolis really wants to be ‘the European JavaOne’ (as I’ve heard people say more than once) I think it’s not nearly big enough. I would expect much more sessions, high-quality sessions even on Friday (see below), more big names in the speakers department and a bigger exposition room with more companies and bigger stands. I wouldn’t mind paying a little more either if it were that big.
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Not being able to blog live during JavaPolis 2005 leaves me with several pages filled with scribbled notes on the various presentations. I’m glad that JavaPolis 2006 is said to feature free on-site WiFi access (you read it here first!). But even so, I’m not sure how easy it is to blog live on the spot. My laptop is rather big and heavy to carry around, it always finds a way to play the Windows welcome jingle when it boots up, no matter what settings I tweak, and it’s actually difficult to focus on the presentation and write a cohesive, intelligible blog entry.
So, about these notes. Thursday I saw…
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