Jazoon – Where Java People Meet

Jazoon'10 will be held 1 - 3 June 2010 in the Arena Filmcity, Zurich, Switzerland. The Jazoon conference program is open for everyone who wishes to contribute. Watch the call for papers in fall. Call for papers will be announced through our newsletter.
All proposals will be reviewed by the Jazoon Program Committee.

We have started to publish the first couple of hundred photos on flickr.com:
flickr.com/groups/jazoon

Simply click on "Jazoon" below any of these photos in our group and see our entire photo stream.

Join the Jazoon group, add your photo to the group or open discussions, you are invited to participate.

We have started to publish the first presentation slides for download. Simply select your favorite talk in the conference schedule and download the presentation. This is how it looks:

If the "Download the presentation"-button is not visible, come back in a couple of days as we are continuing to upload as many presentations as we have. Important notice: we cannot publish all presentations due to copyright restrictions or other reason. So please accept our apology if certain presentations are not available for download.

PS: Don’t forget to rate each talk that you have attended. And please participate in our poll about your favorite Keynote Speaker.

Jazoon kicked off with a spirited re-mix of a pre-recorded Gosling interview on the early history of Java. Surprised by this introduction by his alter-ego, Gosling rolled with it, "I didn't know that was coming - kinda goofy, but fun". His talk started out in awe of how pervasive Java has become. "There are more java devices than people in the world, which is scary". Via smart cards, phones and other embedded deployments, you can't seem to avoid it in modern life. Additionally, "even my 21 year-old daughter, whose interest is forensic anthropology, has embarrassingly been required to take courses in Java". Gosling's keynote surveyed important and interesting technologies in the pipeline including Glassfish v3, which can scale down as well as up and where "EJB is easy"; real time support, where you have more choices in the tradeoff between "Throughput vs Determinism"; new garbage collection options; gains in performance; compressed pointers, allowing 32GiB of address space with the same performance as 4GiB; and the promise of JavaFX with it's upcoming designer-friendly support in providing impressive web experiences, because "more people see a bank's web site than the inside of their lobby". Gosling suggested looking up his "toy show" presentation for cool applications and teased us with the story of "LincVolt" - musician Neil Young's project to convert his '59 Lincoln into a electric hybrid - all controlled by an embedded "bag of Java" complete with its own internet address.

Neal Ford delivered an entertaining and provocative keynote titled "Smithying in the 21st Century" with the theme "how to not become a technical dinosaur". With humor and examples he suggested a few strategies on trying to maintain perspective - sometimes: hard things suddenly become easier, old ideas become "new and improved", and "unnatural" trends deserve the effort of trying to see them through the eyes of the next generation.

Ivar Jacobson followed with, "What they don't teach you about software at school: Be smart!". He made the distinction between being intelligent and being smart, which is a timeless quality for any engineer. Examples of not being smart include "team silos" where business analysts don't talk with developers and developers don't talk with testers. Even worse, many companies still seem to develop using a waterfall methodology. Laughter and approving nods filled the room when he said, "Architecture without executable code is a hallucination."

Danny Coward opened Wednesday with his keynote, "What's coming in Java 7 and what's here in JavaFX". This split his standard top 10 list into two top 5 lists. For Java 7, this included modularity, a more multi-language JVM, java language extensions, more new I/O APIs, and a new garbage collector alternative. His JavaFX list included TV and phone platform support, more UI components, several layout managers, improved performance, and more/better ways to use data.

João Arthur Brunet Monteiro named "Jazoon Rookie 2009"

Jazoon introduced a competition for young developers this year. The "Jazoon Rookie" contest, sponsored by the Basel software firm, Canoo AG, searched for the best speakers and topics relating to Java.

The three finalists, chosen from the internationally represented Jazoon program committee, presented live on Wednesday 24 June before the jury and the audience.

João Arthur Brunet Monteiro from the Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil, was named "Jazoon Rookie 2009". The talk titled "Design Wizard: A Tool That Gives Support to Automatically Check Your Code Against Design Rules" and its presentation convinced the jury and the audience. Coming in a close second was Bettina Polasek from Hungary and third place went to Deni Lumanul Hakim from Indonesia.

Adrian Colyer kicked off Thursday with "The Changing Nature of Enterprise Java Application Development". Using a rainforest analogy, he argued that during periods of stability, established life (at the canopy) enjoys 95% of the available "light". Below the "canopy", survival is difficult and the chance of thriving is even slimmer. Yet these periods of stability are separated by occasional drastic events where established life falls, leading to a period of chaos that allows oppourtunities for alternative life to gain a foothold. As an example, he argues Oracle's acquisition of Sun has helped to provide an oppourtunity for alternative languages. Sun's Danny Coward announced #2 on his list of top five Java 7 features is "better support for other languages in the JVM". Adrian then gave his view of the four fittest language alternatives now receiving "light". He argued that irrespective of which of these might or might not be technically "best", his company has bet on Groovy emerging as the fittest of these - based on popularity, semantic familiarity, and existing integration with important projects like Spring.

Linda Cureton, CIO of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, delivered Jazoon's closing keynote "Web 2.0 @NASA". She started with a brief introduction and list of some "world's firsts" (e.g. first geosynchronous communications satellite) over the last 50 years at Goddard - one of NASA's 10 facilities. But the primary topic of her talk was about introducing "Web 2.0" social networking culture - both internally and externally - to a facility of brilliant, somewhat eclectic staff, whose median age is just under 50. The most recent manifestation was the launch of an internal facebook-inspired application called "Spacebook" - with minor tweaks to help minimize culture-shock. She likened the resulting new transparency to feeling "nekkid" in a way. Yet such feelings are countered by questions such as, "How do you measure the value of being able to collaborate?".

Christian Frei closed the conference with a few statistics, including the news that this year's attendence has increased by more than 20%, and that James Gosling agreed to encourage his daughter to participate in Jazoon Rookie 2010!