Swiss Java

A room full of European pop music, swirling lights, and underfloor neon reminiscent of a Michael Jackson video. Young people in every corner of the club, talking in an assortment of languages.  Was this the latest disco at the university?  No, it was the first Jazoon meeting, which is going on in Zürich this week.

The young people are predominantly developers coming here to learn the latest new technology for Java. Not surprisingly, Sun is a headline sponsor of the event, and many of the delegates have Sun as their affiliation. I attended a few talks on Monday.  I was disappointed to see that a demo/presentation introduction to SOA attracted only 15 delegates; it was an excellent presentation (gave me a feeling that I now have some idea of what really counts as SOA and what doesn't). The 15 of us who were there got quite a treat for our trouble.

My own talk came on Tuesday afternoon, just past lunch. Given the reaction to an SOA talk, I really didn't expect  much interest in a Semantic Web talk.  Half the people in the room self-identified as SW enthusiasts, and the other half as neophytes who had come here to learn. My talk is at a pretty high-level, so I hope that both groups got something out of it.  In any case, everyone stayed to the end and there were a handful of good questions.

	I had the pleasure of  meeting Henry Story and Harold Carr of Sun right after my talk, and learned about the state of adoption of semantic web within Sun.
Photo by Henry Story, used without permission.

They were both interested in seeing more about TopBraid Composer, so I took them through the overview of the hands-on course that we offer. The demo took longer than any I have done - I reckon it was something like 11 hours - you can read about why in Henry's blog :) I probably gave Henry and Harold the impression that I am a hard-core all-night partier, but guess who didn't make it to any of the Wednesday morning talks?  I think the time spent with Henry and Harold was well worth the headache the next morning.

Today is the social outing, which was to start with a boat ride to Rapperswil. Unfortunately, the weather is not cooperating. I suspect that I am not the only one who has decided to forgo the boat trip to Rapperswil. Fortunately, the train goes there as well, so I hope to make it to the walking tour at the end of the day.

Henry gives his talk tomorrow morning - we did some advertising for it at the end of my talk.  Let's hope he gets even more delegates than I did!