Finally, my turn at a keynote

This is a picture of folks filing in to the keynote hall for the last keynote of JavaOne, the one where I had to do some real work. After last nights rehearsals, we (mostly) knew what were were doing, but a lot of the plan was "Ad Lib". I'm not real good at reading teleprompters.

I didn't do much talking. There were zero slides for the whole session (who has time to prepare?!). Three tool demos followed by three device demos. The collaboration facilities in the upcoming version of Java Studio Enterprise got big cheers from the audience. The realtime demo showed a scaleable fault-tolerant VM that balanced an inverted pendulum despite wild loads on the systems, software and hardware failures. PsiNaptics showed a cool JINI-on-bluetooth device that was amazingly small. And Simon Ritter had a great wearable rig.

The "Great Debate" was pretty entertaining. I won't try to represent what happened there, I leave that to someone else to write up, but it surfaced a lot of complex and contradictory concerns.

The E ticket item was, of course, the finals of the T-Shirt launch. Today's team was the caffeinators with their calibrated crossbow. When we held the vote, which was done with an applause meter, the Cyclists came in first, followed by Team Visicomp (the nitro cannon), followed by the Caffeinators. Great fun.

I'd like to thank everyone. The folks in the t-shirt contest. The crew that ran the whole show. All the folks at Sun who have poured so much energy into the show. All the partners that joined in... And especially all of the attendees: JavaOne and the whole Java community are built on your energy and enthusiasm.

Thanks. Now I'm off to a beach!

July 1, 2004