There’s still one more day of sessions left at JavaOne, but the Pavilion with all the booths is now closed, so I thought I’d give my impressions of some of what we saw from the booth. Almost all of the Caucho staff was at the booth at some point and because the company is mostly composed of engineers, we were able to have a lot of useful technical discussions there. These are some of the hot topics that people wanted to talk about:

• Quercus

  I gave a talk on PHP performance with Quercus which got us a lot of serious interest from actual PHP users. But even people who had not heard the talk were really impressed with the technical feat of PHP in Java as well as the performance benefits. The tide has really shifted from a few years ago when people thought PHP and Java were like oil and water. Now both the Java and PHP communities have embraced running PHP with Quercus.

• Cloud

  We were actually in the “Cloud zone” area of the Pavilion and there was a lot of interest from actual users in deploying to clouds. The problem with cloud right now is that few developers or administrators are sure what any vendor is actually providing in terms of cloud support. There are a lot of companies starting up that do simple stuff like deploy a bunch of independent Tomcats and “scale” by starting up a new instance. Hearing that kind of scenario was reassuring for us because it means that Resin’s cloud support is really unique. We’re actually able to do data sharing across clouds to improve performance and reliability in the cloud rather than just throwing more drone servers at the problem.

• Confusion in the Java world

  Sun’s acquisition has Java developers concerned about the direction that Oracle will take the technology. Oracle didn’t have a booth in the Pavilion this year, so they didn’t seem to be pushing WebLogic. However, the Glassfish presence was also greatly reduced from years past, so it’s anybody’s guess as to what the new company’s official app server will be. IBM was also absent from the floor, so the strongest app server presence was from Caucho, JBoss, and SpringSource. Sun seemed much more interested in promoting OpenSolaris and JavaFX.

• JavaEE 6

  Despite what SpringSource is pushing, there are a lot of developers eager to get a hold of the features in JavaEE 6. I heard a lot of interest in Servlet 3.0 and in Java CanDI. The spec isn’t officially out yet and the compliance tests aren’t available either, but we’ve got a pretty good start on many of the components. Our early attempt at an async API for Servlet looks a lot like the one finally accepted for 3.0, so we’re fine there. Also a number of the early CanDI adopters have been really excited about Resin’s implementation.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see us at the booth and to see my talk on Quercus. Overall the attendance at JavaOne was a little lower this year, but I think we had a lot more in depth technical discussions, so it was a really productive conference for us. What were your experiences?

Tags: javaone

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