If you’ve never attended JavaOne, an important piece of advice that you better take heed of is to use OracleWorld’s online Schedule Builder and register yourself for the various sessions you’re interested in attending.
It’s not just about being organized and attacking JavaOne with a plan. The schedule builder not only organizes your day, but when you add yourself to a particular session, you’re actually reserving yourself a seat in that room. Many conferences aren’t quite so rigid with regards to seating and rollcall, but the sheer size and number of people attending JavaOne and OracleWorld makes it a necessity. If you don’t schedule yourself in, you’ll find yourself blocked out of many of the sessions you were most interested in attending. And here's some bad news for those procrastinators out there: certain sessions are already listing themselves as being over capacity.
JavaOne Sessions: How to choose
Of course, once you start looking at that overwhelming schedule, figuring out which sessions you actually want to attend can be quite the challenge. A suggested approach is to go through the speaker list and sort the results based on the company first, and the speaker name second. That way, you’ll quickly be able to narrow down the sessions to the companies whose products you’ll likely find interesting, and from there, you can pick out the names with which you’re familiar. So, a JBoss fan would quickly find a few sessions being presented by the ever popular Emmanuel Bernard, or a fan of Tasktop would find a few interesting sessions in which their CEO Mik Kersten is presenting.
There’s all sorts of gold being presented at JavaOne this year, but here are the names of a couple of speakers that never fail to deliver. Add them to your schedule if there's still availability in any of their sessions:
Adam Bien
Adam Bien made a huge splash at TheServerSide Java Symposium this year, not only by presenting great content, but by delivering it with flair and enthusiasm. He’s practically running the show at JavaOne this year, taking part in the following four sessions:
- 21622 - Rethinking Best Practices with Java EE 6
- 21641 - Java EE 6: The Cool Parts
- 23423 - The Road to Java EE 7: Is It All About the Cloud?
- 29621 - Part 1: GlassFish Community—The Foundation for Opportunity
By the way, TSS is asking the people who attend his Java EE 6 best practices session to harass him endlessly about his reckless advice to abandon the beloved DAO pattern.
Reza Rahman
The author of EJB 3 in Action, Reza not only develops applications, but he also develops application servers, doing some of the heavy lifting on Resin’s Java EE 6 Web Profile implementation. So, he knows the intricacies of the application server better than anyone else presenting at JavaOne. Plus, he’s got a great presence and is an incredibly proficient speaker, so attending any of his sessions is always a pleasure.
If you’re interested in hearing Reza speak, you can choose from any of the following sessions:
- 19941 - CDI Today and Tomorrow
- 20181 - Patterns and Best Practices for CDI
- 23423 - The Road to Java EE 7: Is It All About the Cloud?
- 23647 - JCP and the Developer Community
- 24580 - JSR 343: What's Coming in Java Message Service 2.0
Martijn Verburg
The third speaker you might want to think about adding to your schedule is Martijn Verburg. Again, Martijn made a big splash at TheServerSide Java Symposium with his “Diabolical Developer” presentation in the main hall. He’s also been very active promoting the Java 7 release. This is your opportunity to hear Martijn speak about the future of Java before any PR people or handlers start working him over.
- 23641 - Meet the Executive Committee Candidates
- 23645 - Lightning Talks: JSRs in Progress
- 23647 - JCP and the Developer Community
- 25303 - The Diabolical Developer (Redux)
- 30440 - Java User Groups and the JCP
But regardless of which sessions you attend, just make sure you’ve used JavaOne’s online scheduler and guaranteed yourself a seat. If you don’t, you just might find yourself on the outside of the auditorium door listening in.