Before kicking off Java One this week in San Francisco, Sun held their second Community One conference, pulling in several thousand developers for a free technical conference. While there was a large keynotes in the morning featuring Ian Murdock of Debian fame and Rich Green, head of Software at Sun, the real appeal was in the smaller sessions throughout the day.

In many ways, Community One was not a single conference, but rather a gathering of mutliple different conferences (and un-conferences) under one roof. There was RedMonk's un-conference which covered topics ranging from business models, to Twitter best practices. There was Startup Camp, which focused on the business and technology of creating a successful startup company (on a budget), as well presentations by developers for developers on topics ranging from how to do load balancing using MySQL Proxy to developing NetBeans plug-ins and scaling out with cloud-based computing. Perhaps the biggest challenge was that there were so many good sessions going on that there's no way you could take it all in. Also notable, the un-conference portion only works if people are fully engaged and actively driving the discussion. It's not meant as a spectator sport, which can be a bit of a change for some conference attendees.

Hopefully Savio or Matt will blog about some of the sessions. And if you missed Community One, there's still plenty of hardcore tech information this week with Java One.

If you haven't checked out an un-conference before, Web-programming guru David Pollak tells me there's another one planned for this weekend in San Francisco called Scala LiftOff that focuses on the lift framework and Scala programming language. Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine and looks to be gaining more traction all the time. While it's not the only solution out there, there are definitely a lot of smart folks contributing to and using Scala and lift. This is worth paying attention to...

Posted by Zack Urlocker on May 5, 2008 10:05 PM