I am now at the Java One Pavillion exhibition in San Francisco. Sitting at a Sun publicly available computer writing these lines.
Boring! Last year it was quite more interesting. Maybe because then I had a specific task to evaluate as many profiling tools as possible and I was set on a target. Today is just a pointless browsing.
Main impression that this exhibition leaves - there is no such thing as Open Source. All the booths are occupied by commercial products that help you develop your stuff faster. Ironically, most of them are still have open source products as their foundation. You can see plenty of products that promise you that you'll be more efficient in developing with Spring, Tomcat, jBoss. And interestingly all these people are quite excited about their products. It seems very strange because living here in Silicon Valley and having so many friends developing in J2EE I don't know anyone who would use these third party solutions. All people use plain vanilla approaches. I even know a guy who is still writing his Java programs in Emacs! But this is a clinical case :))
I've seen an interesting product though. Since currently I am quite interested in UML and how to conveniently integrate it in our designing and development process I stopped at this booth: www.magicdraw.com . The product itself is quite interesting but nothing exciting though. I got a trial version from them and going to spend some time evaluating it. The guy who was telling me about this product is Lithuanian (and their all development is outsourced to Lithuania) - quite young but speaking a very good Russian.
Now I see a booth with bit "Google" on it and I am going to visit it. I wander if they give cool give aways :)
