Jazoon 2007: Day 1 Keynote

And we're off. I'm listening to the keynote session. Taking place in a movie theater, seems like the conference is taking place inside some cinema metroplex called Sihl-city, or Movie-City.

We weren't really aware of the size or scale of Jazoon up front. Seeing the amount of people in the theater, it's not too positively surprising. The theater is about 2/3rds full, I think I can count the number of attendees in the hundreds. There is an okay amount of stands, many of which are naturally Swiss companies that I've never heard of, and I'm guessing most of the attendees are Swiss as well. I've only counted 6 Norwegians so far, the three of us from Objectware included. The other three are from Sun, two of them are doing talks on JavaDB later on.

After some welcomes and intros there were some (dry) words from the sponsors, including Andreas Knöpfli, manager Sun, Switzerland, a guy from Elca, Swizz IT service company. Red Herring, some magazine. Farley Duvall is talking bout globalization. Says that central Europe is the most promising part of the world concerning entrepeneur/capital/education and everything.

I'll hand it to them that the media videos in between sessions are pretty cool though.

Then its on to Ted Neward's talk on the past and future of our use of programming languages.

The program in Jazoon is quite Sun-dominated. Was sort of funny to hear Neward bashing early stages of the JDK, and not even mentioning Netbeans when it comes to IDEs.

Ted Neward is a good talker. He sounds and looks abit like Jeff Bridges. Spent alot of time convincing us how much work it is to develop a language from scratch. Goes on into DSL's, easy to develop new languages. Perfect storm. Talking about virtualization and tools and linguistics.
Mentioned Ruby. Green threads. Long story short, there are a lot of possibilites coming up when it comes to us developing and using langues on top the JVM (or any other VM).

Now it's off to lunch. Think I'll catch the talk on Java virtualization after the break.

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