The Seventh Jini Community Meeting (Final)

This is my last blog from the Seventh Jini Community Meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 23-25, 2004.

caveat: I should remind everybody that these are my observations and thoughts and not necessarily of those of my employer, any other member of the Jini community, or indeed anyone else on the planet. I'm a member of the Jini development team so these next few blogs will be "a little closer to home" than the essays I've done for Artima previously. Well, consider yourself warned! <grin>

Wrapping Up

Jim Hurley's opening on the last day began with the notion Finishing Strong and so we did. During the previous two days, sessions had some small break between them but not so on the last day. We crammed all we could in those few hours before the close.

It also appeared that participants took the sleep is optional idea seriously. By the end of the conference people were visibly fatigued--but happy.

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball

Did I mention that this event was really fun? I got a chance to just sit with Ken Arnold for a while playing with his mood ring application. We sat there with our PowerBooks and the spontaneous network created by Rendezvous and were able to start a small Jini Djinn. We sat there and just played with his hack for a while. That was a blast.

I also ran into a fellow I had worked with 20 years ago. His company is now looking to get started with Jini to solve some hard problems they've got in their next generation of systems. I won't name drop here, but perhaps he'll be back at the next Community Meeting speaking on their successes.

The meeting's attendance of about 100 developers was the right number. It was intimate yet there were enough people there you probably didn't know that you could have the opportunity to meet somebody new and learn some new stuff.

Here are the last few observations:

• Installer and deployment helpers
  There was a great deal of interest in finding better ways of deploying Jini-based services into production. Note that this is a big change from previous years where the questions and concerns were more along the lines of finding ways of climbing the learning curve. People aren't just playing with the technology; they're deploying it.
• Transaction managers are in active use
  It isn't always clear to us in the Jini group which pieces of the Starter Kit are being used and which ones are not. Specifically, I'd been wondering if anybody was actually using Mahalo, or Mercury, or Norm, and it was clear from the discussions that all this stuff (and more) is getting exercised. That's great!
• Licensing issues
  There is a small groundswell of interest in the SCCL now that everybody wants to deploy and repackage this stuff. If folks were struggling with the technology or had no interest in deploying it, there certainly wouldn't be any interest in details of the license. I'm looking at this in a very positive way.
• A desire to have better access to the source
  There was some rumbling in the group about getting the Jini source tree out of the Cathedral in Sun and more into the Bazaar, perhaps even in a CVS tree on Jini.org. I think this shows a general maturity of the community which cannot be understated.

So ends the Seventh Jini Community Meeting. It was my first meeting (for some reason I'd been busy or traveling for the others). I hope to see everyone again at the next one!