Keynoting at JavaOne

Thanks to Charles Beckham I've been invited onto the Keynote at JavaOne on Tuesday to talk about some of the rather cool things that Sun are working on in the tooling space. Historically I've always been very impressed with what I've seen from Charles, but they've never made it out into the wild too often or its taken a long time to get there. So tomorrow could be interesting ;)

Anyway today was practice day, you get the nice black "all access" badge, so in I wander to the Keynote room. Different logistics to previous years its a long-room rather than a wide room, but with the massive screens all over the place to make sure people can see. The door was right at the back so I had to walk all the way past the empty chairs, its like I Robot on a smaller budget. Up on stage at the time were James Gosling and John Gage doing their bit, or rather discussing their bits.

So Charles took me behind the scenes, and to be honest I was gobsmacked, we aren't talking about a production set-up with 10 people or something, its massive with the sort of set-up you'd expect at a sports event outside broadcast. The resolutions of the screens is pretty amazing up close, not the blurred effect I'd expected. We did the walk-through and kept to our 7 minute slot and Charles showed some rather nice elements, look out for the XML tool he demos there is the foundation of something really special there, especially in terms of performance on big XML docs and schemas.

Now I'm pretty used to presenting, but I have to say standing on a stage with thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people in front of me is filling me with the screaming heebie jeebies.

I'll blog again tomorrow about what it is like behind the scenes, and this time I'll make sure I recharge my camera phone.