First up: the health of the show 

We product marketing guys can use the JavaOne show as a quickie litmus test to gauge the general health of the Java marketplace.  How is the show going, compared to last year and the year before?  Is JavaOne still, after 10+ years, an important event?  Are there lots of attendees and other vendors?  Is Java itself still important?   After all, if there is a big downturn or upswing, we may use this to help us determine the resources we dedicate to our Java product line.

Diagnosis:  Steady, with just a slight decline in the number of sessions, events, people, and general buzz.

Next up:  How is the exhibit booth?

This is something that many conference attendees never pay attention to: they are there to soak up knowledge and couldn’t care less about commercial vendors and their exhibit booths.  But, of course, we vendors care very much about things like booth traffic (are we on the main drag, or in no-man’s land?), booth placement (do we have noisy neighbors with annoyingly amplified sales pitches?), booth messaging (will the guy walking by understand what we do quickly or is our signage too obscure?), booth giveaways (is that guy who is collecting the free goodies–a.k.a. a “trick or treater”–really a possible customer?), etc.    Which of our competitors are there at JavaOne this year?  What are they pushing that’s new?  And, more intriguing, which competitors are not there?   It all has a sort of (upscale) “carnival midway” feeling about it…

Diagnosis:  Very healthy (for us, at least).  Those who worked in the ILOG booth were quite pleased with the large number of conference attendees they chatted with. 

Finally: What’s the buzz?

As a product manager, I look around the show floor to see if I’m missing any trends that might effect the products I work on.  Likewise, it’s interesting to see what “buzz” Sun is putting out there, to show that they understand the trends and are, of course, leading the way.  (wink!)

This year, in the Java circles that we run in (user interfaces, of course), the hands-down hot topic was RIA (Rich Internet Applications).  Last year, Sun announced JavaFX and this year they seemed to re-announce it.   JavaFX is their answer to Adobe’s Flex and AIR, and to Microsoft’s Silverlight (both of whom were also at the conference, interestingly enough).   Most of the people I spoke with said they have a “wait and see” attidtude about JavaFX, though.

JavaFX, Flex, and Silverlight are all trying to do the same thing: give the world a RIA experience that is far better than Ajax.   Ajax and its programming frameworks are a beast, developers tell me, and the end result of all that hard work is, of course, quite cool–but it’s not as interactive or as glitzy as JavaFX, Flex, or Silverlight.

Diagnosis:  For RIA, the fight for the developer mind is still on.  For us at ILOG, we are actively following Flex/AIR (see our ILOG Elixir product) and are experimenting with Silverlight.   Of course, Ajax has been a big part of all of ILOG Java products for some time now, and will continue to be a major emphasis for us.   So, for us, the buzz at this show was all about RIA and we were smack dab in the middle of it.

A final note:   A big thank you to all of the ILOG customers who came by the ILOG booth to chat with us.   It’s nice to hear about your successes.   And we heard you about some of the Ajax interoperability issues you might face soon, and have started burning the midnight oil…

The day began with a really interesting debate by a between Microsoft and Adobe presenters, where we could see side by side the RIA contenders: Silverlight and Flex.

We gave some talks on AJAX technology, Graph Layout and Performance in JViews and had excellent discussions with customers, seeing what they did with our products and getting first hand opinions on their expectations for the future.

The VUME in Madrid was even better - with almost twice the number of attendees than we expected. The weather was sunny and warm, and we were able to have a few “cerveza” and “tapas” on a nice piazza near the Hotel.

The opening talk of that day was a on an interesting project a customer did to supervise the country commercial airplane and airport operations. Another customer was there to explain how he was able to simplify his multi-tier architecture thanks to Gantt.NET product.

We did more or less the same presentations than in France; however, we had to fall back to English as we were not able to find enough Spanish speakers in the development team for all the presentations. This might have been a problem for some of the attendees, but 95% of the audience stayed until the last presentation.