JavaOne '04

It was my first visit to downtown San Francisco. I was amazed at how steep the streets were! Equally steep were the parking prices. One time, I had to shell out $27 for about 4 hours. Crazy!

It wasn’t too bad near Mascone center though, where JavaOne was going on. It was exciting to see cool new Java technologies and gadgets at the Pavilion. I spent most of the time manning our booth, but managed to catch a couple of good sessions, especially one where Eric Gamma was showing off the newest version of Eclipse and what the future holds for the platform. The key takeaway from that speech was how Eclipse has transformed from a “Java IDE” to a “Tools Platform”.

It was probably the three days of my life where I spoke the most. There were throngs of people coming at our booth (Kinzan) and we were giving the demo non-stop for almost 8 straight hours each day. We launched our product Kinzan Studio for Java and announced that we are open sourcing our component framework for building web apps, called the MVC² framework. It is a cool new technology. You should check it out!.

An interesting aspect of our framework is that the components are described in XML and it is platform agnostic. We have it working with Java and .NET (Java version is in production and .NET in beta). In fact, our demo application we showed had Scott McNealy exchanging messages with Steve Balmer via web services :) on Java and .NET sides respectively. We managed to create a stir though!

(that’s James, our Marketing guru. Picture courtesy MaryMaryQuiteContrary)

Many people thought our T-shirts were way cool. It proclaimed E=MVC² in bold green letters on a black background. They are still available! We are having a component contest where the first 100 submissions will get that T-shirts and the best 3 will get an iPod. Go Grab it before they are gone!