I’m currently standing behind a Sun terminal at the conference and due to the position one has to take to use the keyboard and see the screen, it is impossible to make this a lengthy entry describing everything I’ve seen and heard today.
The conference was opened by the General Session aka keynote of Sun themselves. And the message was pretty clear: Please join the JCP (we only have 1052 members) and please download and use Netbeans. Nothing more, nothing less except for some minor details like the birth of JEE 5 and the incredible impact it will have and the announcement that Java once will become really open source (quote : the question is not whether, but how). Openness matters but its clear Sun is still struggling with their other marketing exclamation: Compatibility matters.
About netbeans, two major statements were made. The first was coming from JBoss founding father Mark Fleury who declared that JBoss will support (and donate to?) the netbeans platform (Hey, is JBoss IDE not eclipse based?). The second was coming from Sun themselves declaring they will bring their Studio Creator to the open source community by donating it to Netbeans. It seems the IDE war has entered a new phase.
One other very small thing that caught my attention was about certification. Since we’re not talking J2EE anymore but JEE 5 (Still having problems pronouncing it fluently), we all need to recertificate to become JEE certified developers or architects. So for all who are planning to do their exams, please wait for the new certification program. And for those who already are certified, start reading books again!
