Report from JavaOne

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Many of you may be aware that Microsoft officially participated in Sun's JavaOne conference for 2005. The focus of the Microsoft presence at the event was Interoperability between Java and .NET, and Wednesday was "Interoperability Day" at JavaOne. Most of the major Java/.NET interop sessions happened Wednesday, including tech talk sessions and panel discussions.

In addition though, Microsoft had a booth on the expo floor, and there we had demos running showing Java-to-.NET interop, via webservices, via 3rd party bridges, via shared queues (MSMQ and MQSeries), via shared database, and so on. Also other Java-to-Microsoft interop like JSPs running in Tomcat, generating Office documents in XML; Java access to ActiveDirectory via JNDI/LDAP, the new JDBC driver for SQL Server 2005, and others. These demos surprised many attendees. We also had lots of educational and how-to material on hand - DVDs with webcasts, whitepapers, sample code - all covering how to interop between .NET and Java. We also had on hand a stack of Simon Guest's interop book. We gave over 500 books away during the event. I speak with customers all the time about interop, but the level of interest here at JavaOne was surprising, even for me.

Judging from the number of people in the booth, and the feedback I got, the Microsoft presence at the event was very well received. I participated in a panel discussion covering .NET and Java interop, which was well attended and went very well (IMO). I'm very intetrested in comments from J1 attendees on the MS presence - please chime in below.

Attendees will be able to view webcasts of the JavaOne sessions on Sun's site, sometime in July or August, said the conference organizers. Also, non-attendees will be able to purchase access to the web replays, for a nominal fee. I went to the JavaOne website to look for this, but found webcasts of JavaOne 2003 and 2002, but not 2004 or 2005. ?? Hoping they will straighten this out soon.

A couple of the other vendors asked if Sun and other Java-based companies will be present at the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, September 12-18. I don't know what the plans are there, but so far I do not see Sun or JBoss on the PDC exhibitors list.

What would you all like to see?