OK, so better late than never. I’m finally getting around to writing up the rest of JavaOne 2005. I had really intended to write up the day’s events every night before going to bed, but things were just too busy.
The keynote started with Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy taking the stage. He is quite a charismatic speaker and seems to be a good person to have representing the company in the public space. He announces the aquisition of SeeBeyond Inc. by Sun. SeeBeyond is an Enterprise Application Integration company that has a suite of tools for working in the EAI space. This stuff is definitely going to be big. I will definitely have to focus more on the EAI world (which I am doing now through my work with the open source Business Integration Engine and as a Beta tester for BizTalk 2006).
Next Olivier Piou, CEO of Axalto, talked about the status and impact of the JavaCard technology. There are currently 1 billion JavaCard devices out there and Piou expects that in 3 years there will be another billion JavaCard devices (the ID cards for JavaOne have embedded JavaCard chips in them).
The keynote then kind of diverges into a socio-political slant in which Sun makes a strong statement regarding their desire to opensource the Education and Health Care industries in order to improve these two areas for everyone. They show an interesting video about the Brazilian health care system and how Java technology has improved the overall system.
Fabiani Nardon, CTO of Brazilian National Health Care System, comes up to talk about the progress they have made using Java. 2.5 Million lines of code developed in 4 months. Very integrated with using JavaCard technology to store medical information. She mentions that they have been talking with Africa about how to share what they have built and learned to improve their health care system.
Next the idea of opensource education is brought up. This is something I am all for. I am convinced there are plenty of poor teachers and poor educational systems out there. Someone knows how to get information into people’s heads, so we should find them and use their methods and materials to teach our children. As part of this initiative they mention the JEDI (Java Education & Development Initiative) project from the Phillipines, the BlueJ project, the GELC (Global Education Learning Community) project, the MIT OpenCourseWare open source curriculum, and the Sun Student Developer Community.