Microsoft at JavaOne 2007 - Day 1 - General

About: This blog post is part of the “Microsoft at JavaOne 2007” series; it covers some of the sessions on Day 1 and provides general commentary

Hello,

It about 4:40 p.m. and I am sitting in a session called the “Future of the Java Web Tier”. Throughout the day I have answered questions about Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Vista, Windows mobile and Microsoft’s AJAX story at the MS booth, we have had about a thousand people come to the booth since morning, I have also popped in and out of various sessions.  We had a lot of questions around interoperability between .NET front end and java business tier which remains the number one request from companies who invested heavily in Java but want to take advantage of .NET especially on the front end. I was surprised by the number of people who showed interest in getting a DVD of Visual Studio Express edition and mentioned that their companies now have both Java and .NET and they need to learn .NET and how to interoperate between the two technologies. We also had a number of Java ISVs that visited the booth saying as a small business they did not want to choose between the two and want to learn more about technologies that allows them to work with customers on both sides.

In terms of the big story, I think the most exciting things at JavaOne seem to be related to the mobile devices followed by some of the real-time stuff, the web story and demonstration would have been exciting to see in year 2000 but as I mentioned the demos were not very compelling and a number of press and analyst that visited our booth commented that they were expecting something more dramatic. It seems that it was a small effort within a group that suddenly got a lot of attention (probably after the focus on Silver Light at Mix).  I am attending the future of Java Web Tier session to see if there is a more compelling story around Java on the Web that was missed at the keynote.

Rajiv who is delivering a session on future of Java web tier is talking about Servlet 3.0 and AJAX and REST. The presentation so far has been about the various technologies and how Java works with them, one interesting point was AJAX support JavaServer pages. I have enjoyed the session as it provided a good overview of the state of the union.

In terms of next things, we are giving out Microsoft Windows Vista (through a draw) at the welcome reception tonight, I look forward to attending the Oracle keynote tomorrow and the Motorola keynote (which I suspect would be the most exciting) on Thursday. I am also looking forward to the after dark bash, the JavaOne party on May 10 which features killer bots and virtual flying dukes. I will head back now to the welcome reception that starts at 6:00 p.m., by the way when I called to setup a wakeup call at my hotel, the operator offered a ‘menu of inspirational messages’ that I could get as part of the wakeup call... only in the great city of San Francisco would you be offered inspirational messages and a ‘dream on’ (instead of a good bye) by the operator! I will report live from Tomorrow’s keynote again, adios for now

Best regards,

Mohammad