It’s a common known fact that most of the conference keynotes are quite boring, commercial and (unfortunately) inevitable presentations that have the only purpose of announcing the latest and greatest news from the sponsoring companies; more seldom, something interesting happens: that’s the case of last Thursday’s Javapolis keynote.
The schedule looked like quite innocent:
- Thinking in Flex with Bruce Eckel
- Parleys.com v2 with Stephan Janssen
- Sun Microsystems keynote (on Java Mobile, Java FX, Sun Spot and other…)
Thinking in Flex was the usual, half-informative and half-commercial presentation about Adobe Flex and it’s integration with Java and Java EE applications. I had the opportunity to have a quick look at Flex in the preceding days, so there was nothing really new in this presentation for me.
The following presentation about Parleys v2 is what made much difference. If you don’t know what’s Parleys.com, check the website first; in brief, Parleys is a Web 2.0 website which gives access to a huge amount of technical conference videos, recorded by the Belgian Jug and other organizations. Really cool and useful.
Some months ago Stephan Janssen, the leader of the Belgian Jug, decided to rewrite the website frontend, and chose Flex as main technology; the speech was the public presentation of his work (which still is not online).
I have only two words about the demo: simply astonishing.
Stephan (and actually another German guy Benjamin Dobler who wrote the Flex interface) really managed to demonstrate how you can build the coolest Web application using Flex (and therefore Flash) as front-end technology, and Java EE as back-end. Everything was well designed, simple, fast, with a few but very slick and effective animations.
Finally, the hard part. You know I have some “connections” with Sun (through the Java Champions project), so it’s kind of hard to say, but really what happened is that, after such a great showcase of what Adobe and Flex can do for your job, we assisted to one of the most un-exciting and low-fi presentation. Ever.
- Talks, talks and talks about how many Java-enabled phones are out there
- A demo showing how to create the ugliest game possible for your mobile phone (using the game designer of Netbeans). People were really in disbelief, probably everyone in the room has created most sexy, graphically appealing and complex games with his Commodore Vic20. When he was 8.
- How to move your robots using Sun Spot. Again. AGAIN. I’m afraid, Sun Microsystems, I have seen this presentation so many times now that I really cannot pay more attention to this stuff. I’ve seen robots moving, micro-cars running, lights flashing, every kind of useless thing connected to a Sun Spot.
That was it, for Sun keynote. Nothing cool, nothing new, nothing to catch you attention. Just the same old demos, the same demos that Sun’s evangelists show in every conference and Java User Group every week.
Maybe it was a quite typical keynote, but compared to Flex wonders, the message arrived to the people last Thursday was “With Flex/Flash you can make great UIs simply… with Java you can’t”. Sad thing for people working every day to spread the opposite message among customers.
The bottom line is, Adobe is looking at Java developers as their next market. And differently from other vendors, like IBM, Bea or Oracle, Adobe is using is unique approach to conquer its space: great attention to details (ask Adobe Max attenders how cool was that conference), great-looking demos and a focus on building powerful and usable tools that really empower the developer. And Sun must learn quickly to become more than the all-engineering-”I show you the code” company, because providing good technology is necessary, but not enough; you have to talk effectively to developers and companies, show them how they can creatively use the tools to make something cool and, ultimately, to make more money.
I think everyone should learn at least one lesson from this keynote: evangelists are good for courses, are good for teaching people the basics of the technology. But at a keynote you have to do much more, you have to make people dream of what they would be able to build using a new technology.
And to do that, you have to find out people who actually use the technology to build something great, like Stephan did.
User-generated keynotes… isn’t is Web2.0-ish?
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