JavaOne – Next year in Vegas?
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4 min read
OK, my adrenaline is back to normal, and it’s time for a wrap-up about JavaOne.
As the Main Event in which we participate every year, this year’s JavaOne was big for JFrog. Judge for yourself: at JavaOne 2009 we introduced the Pro and Cloud versions of Artifactory Binaries Repository Manager at JavaOne. At JavaOne 2011 we were honored to get the Java Community hug and get the Duke’s Choice Award, and this year we created the amazing Continuous Delivery DemoZONE.
But, let’s start chronologically. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Fast forward.
On September 30, one day before JavaOne 2012, the Jenkins User Conference San Francisco took place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. There were two tracks packed with CI talks from the industry’s leading experts and speakers and a great keynote address by Mr. Jenkins himself, Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Gareth Bowles and Brian Moyles gave unique sneak peak into highly loaded Netflix build and deployment infrastructure (built on Jenkins and Artifactory). I delivered a talk about the advanced aspects of writing user plugins (actually, a sequel to Noam’s talk at Israeli Jenkins User Conference) and a short lightning talk to showcase the advantages of Artifactory (repo.jenkins-ci.org is an Artifactory instance on the cloud) to Jenkins plugins developers. Good networking and an engaged audience hosted by friends. Sounds like a great event, and it was.
But that was only a warm-up before the real thing – the Continuous Delivery DemoZONE. Yes, together with Gradleware and CloudBees we’ve offered our own DemoZONE right in the middle of the Exhibition Hall of JavaOne, and it was big! A picture worth a thousand words. But I’ll add some words anyhow. The JFrog team, Mark Prichard of CloudBees, Hans Dockter and Peter Niederwieser of Gradleware – together and in separate showcases – demoed and ignited the audience about the greatest continuous delivery stack developers ever had. Sure thing, Artifactory, Gradle and Jenkins-CI are killer tools on their own merit, but when they come together they are unstoppable! That the Continuous Delivery DemoZONE was the most crowded booth at the Exhibition Hall proves it well.
As every year, we had the best tee around. Keeping the movie parody theme, we rocked with the Frogfather t-shirt, reminding everybody that Artifactory is an offer you can’t refuse! More than thousand tees vanished in a storm. Looks like we’ll have to print even more next year.
Fred Simon our Chief Architect rocked on stage with “How we took our server-side application to the Cloud and liked what we got”, the story of Artifactory going to the cloud (from the technical point of view – classloaders and stuff).
Not that we had time to attend any sessions… well, actually, we managed to sneak into some. So, first of all – James Gosling on stage throwing t-shirts. What a great nostalgic sight and what a smart move by Oracle! Thank you, guys. All you need to do to bring back the glory days is get us out of the hotel maze. If it takes moving the OpenWorld+JavaOne to Vegas – count me in!
John Ferguson Smart gave a great session “Real-World Strategies for Continuous Delivery with Maven and Jenkins” (and blogged about it at java.net), all about the good stuff in CD (including Artifactory). Our friends from CloudBees kicked with Java PaaS: The Engine for Delivering Enterprise and Mobile Applications. As usual, I enjoyed the official RockStars Guillaume Laforgeand Dierk König talking about Groovy, Graeme Rocher on Grails, Kevin Nilson on HTML 5, Chris Beams and Arun Gupta discussing if (and how) Java EE and SpringSource can live together. The unstoppable Steven Chin gave 8 (eight!) talks. I won’t lie claiming I attended all of them… OK, I should stop now. My boss thinks I was at the booth at all times.
So, it was an amazing ride, and now it’s time to work hard and follow up on all the great user feedback we get from our users “1st hand” at the booth. Next year it will somehow be bigger again. Go figure.
P.S. Talking about a ride – some stretch limos with JFrog logos were spotted around driving some folks to the “Frogs & Friends” event, but that belongs to my next post…
