W-JAX 2009: Opening by Sebastian Meyen

w-jaxDisclaimer: This entry has been written while listening to the talk. Please forgive me any typographical or grammatical errors resulting from this approach.

Sebastian will open the conference with an overview of hot topics and things to come. Let’s get ready to rumble…

First of all Sebastian commented that “the crisis” didn’t prevent the W-JAX from being a record W-JAX… with visitor numbers and interest through the roof… IT does not yet seem to be hit by stagnation and the will to invest and innovate is running strong. Additionally 144 speakers are a record mark, covering more than 150 sessions, 18 special days and 9 parallel sessions.

As specials Sebastian highlighted the EJB day – EJB finally seems to be overcoming its own crisis starting with the reinvention of EJB 3. A point I heartily concur with. A new and fresh look at EJB and what it can do today definitely is worth the time.

Another interesting topic is covered in the Scala day, Scala being the upcoming hype language. Sebastian also honestly noted that we still lack reference projects and successes but still is very positive about its potential. Martin Oderskys Scala keynote will be very interesting in that regard.

Next he addressed the SOA day and mentioned the SOA manifesto… efforts trying to prove that SOA is neither dead nor irrelevant.

Another focal point is cloud computing – stressed by the fact that SpringSource was bought by VMWare in order to become a major player in the cloud market as a followup to classic middleware software.

Also new are two industry days – both the finance day covering all technologies relevant for software solutions in the financial sector and the e-health day covering the needs of healthcare software.

Then he thanked the advisory board – it was nice to be at the top of the slide. I got nervous when he noted that those people also are hosts for the special days… something I didn’t know so far at least as far as I am concerned ๐Ÿ˜‰ Luckily the printed program doesn’t list a special track for which I might have been responsible so I guess that Sebastians statement was just a bit too general… *breath of relief* ๐Ÿ˜‰

He proceeded with a variety of organizational statements… I’m mostly concerned with the stability of the W-LAN access. We’ll see how we are going to fare this year.

Then he announced another new feature… the conference CD no longer will be provided. Instead the Software & Support publishing house now offers the Intellibook concept, shortly explained by Masoud Kamali. Basically all Software & Support related information (Java magazine, slides, …) will be available via Internet – some for free, some for fees. A good and logical next step.

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