His keynote, delivered the morning following the Java Superbowl, couldn't live up to the bowl's energy, but was nonetheless captivating for a lot of the developers in attendance. Gosling centered his talk around the practical problems and challenges facing Java developers and engineers today, and obstacles to overcome in the coming year. He pointed out that this task was difficult in part because Java virtual machines have so far been deliberately optimized for portability rather than scalable performance. I was also interested to see him discuss in detail the Seven Fallacies of Distributed Computing , first put forth by Peter Deutsch several years ago. Gosling argued that Java-based technology can allow us to cope with a lot of these problems, but only if we recognize them and build our software accordingly.
Some conferences are almost an exercise in marketing and hype driven futility.
If I had to rate SD98's courses, product announcements, and exhibition space on a scale from heavy hype to particularly practical, my rating would fall strongly to the practical side of the scale. About the author Bill Day is a software engineer at Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Bill's byline has also appeared in a SunWorld feature article. When Bill is not writing or programming, he loves to travel with his wife, speak French, and enjoy life. The official SD98 Web site.