A tale of two trade shows
J.D. Hildebrand visits JavaCon 2000 and the Embedded Systems Conference.
Business took me to the San Francisco Bay Area last week and I took the
opportunity to look in on a pair of conferences for professional software
developers.
DOING THE JAVACON JIVE>
Sponsored by Java
Developer's Journal publisher Sys-Con Publications, the International
Conference for Java Technology 2000 took place at the Santa Clara Convention
Center next to the Great America amusement park. Sys-Con says the conference
brought together 70 exhibitors, 100 speakers, and more than 2,500 Java
programmers.
The conference center bustled with energy and electricity. Java expertise is
in high demand in Silicon Valley these days, and the developers who attended
this show were serious about learning as much as they could. They rushed the
doors when sessions opened and they relentlessly pursued information about
products and services in the exhibit hall.
I was surprised to see how many of the vendors participating in the
conference offered high-level design tools. Over the years, I've come to the
conclusion that real programmers don't use high-level tools...at least, not
unless management forces them to. Most developers like to get as close to the
metal as they can get. They don't like the code contributed by code generators
and GUI builders, and they distrust commercial libraries and CASE tools.
JavaCon 2000 has gone a long way toward convincing me that my thinking is
out-of-date. In the Java world, at least, developers seem ready to take
advantage of the productivity benefits of high-level modeling tools and code
generators. The booths were mobbed. I caught up with my old friends at Togethersoft
and marveled at the rest.
The other remarkable thing about JavaCon was the number of recruiters. Every
aisle I went down, headhunters pressed info packs into my hand as if I
were a Java expert. I was flattered but bemused.
Speaking of mobs, you should have seen the standing-room-only crowd at
Inprise/Borland chief scientist Blake Stone's presentation. Blake showed
JBuilder 4 to an enthusiastic crowd, then led the programmers across the exhibit
hall to the Borland booth for a launch party complete with refreshments. The
JBuilder team -- 25 or 30 of them, all wearing matching blue T-shirts -- posed
for a group photo in front of the booth to celebrate the launch of the product.
I believe JBuilder 4 was the biggest product launch at the conference.
COMING HOME TO ROMDEX
The Embedded Systems
Conference was held at the San Jose Convention Center the same week as
JavaCon, so I drove down and checked it out.
I should admit that my interest was part professional and part personal. Ted
Bahr and I launched the Embedded Systems Conference in 1989 as part of the Embedded
Systems Programming project we conceived at Miller Freeman. I remember
attending an electronics show where we were blown away by the number and size of
the booths, and we sat up in a hotel room and wrote a whole business plan on a
TRS-80 Model 100. We really wanted to call the show "ROMdex," but
cooler heads prevailed. No matter -- we were sure it was destined to be a big,
important conference.
It turns out we were right. ESC was huge this year -- exhibits filled every
square foot of space in the convention center, including hallways and
mezzanines. They just kept jamming in more exhibitors. In fact, they had to move
the registration area across the street into another facility. Tens of thousands
of engineers visited the show.
The big buzz at this year's ROMdex was Linux, which has turned out to be
ideally suited to use in embedded systems and Internet appliances. In fact, Red
Hat executives have recently said that they expect Linux to dominate the
desktop, but not necessarily on PCs. Instead, Linux will be the operating system
of choice for cell phones, pagers, PDAs, home and office automation systems,
entertainment devices, Web devices, and more.
This development matches my
own assessment of Linux's promising future in the embedded world.
My favorite exhibit at the Embedded Systems Conference was sponsored by San
Jose-based ARC Cores, a
developer of customizable microprocessors. Like other exhibitors, ARC had a song
and dance it wanted show attendees to experience. But instead of setting up a
stage, ARC put the presentation on a video server and set up its booth with
virtual-reality headgear and joysticks. Inside the VR experience, engineers
navigated their way through an exciting virtual world of electronic gear. From
the outside, they appeared to be sitting in ghostly silence, tilting their heads
and twisting their joysticks according to cues only they could see. It was a
cool preview of the trade show of the future.
WRAPPING UP
I was able to do a little business in Scotts Valley after the shows closed,
then headed home to New England in time to catch the leaves
beginning to turn from summer green to the golds, oranges, and scarlets of
autumn. I've got plenty of firewood in the basement and a spanking-new copy of
JBuilder 4...looks like it's going to be a cozy winter.
Keep hacking!
An award-winning writer and editor with more than 20 years' experience, J.D.
Hildebrand is the content director of the Borland Developer Community.
