The JavaOne conference passed me by this year, as did the previous seven. I never get the time to attend these things since I'm in the UK and it's a long journey. So I sat back in my big developer's chair and watched the Java world pass by like Weblogs in the night.

One of the hot blogging topics covered was, of all things, Christina Aguilera. More to the point, you could access vital Christina information via mobile technology. From a Java technology perspective, Sun hit the nail right on the mobile device head. From where I sat developers got the java.com site all wrong; here's a hint ­ it's not for developers! I was really happy to see the new site; Sun is finally marketing in the right direction for Java technology. They've figured out how to sell to the consumer. We can send the rocket scientists home now.

Java in the developer domain is all very well, but if it's not exposed properly to the consumer, then I may as well go back to Perl coding, as I won't have a steady job in 12 months.

The other hot blogging topic was Rave crashing on its first run. (I know this never happens to you guys.) Code will always work until it's shown in public; the general rule of thumb is the larger the public gathering, the larger the crash-and-burn element.

The blogging community once again has shown its major traits: first, as a community it can have the latest news up in a matter of minutes. Alan was blogging while the keynotes were happening; all I have to do now is discipline myself to read them. Now I don't want to lift our illustrious leader up too high but he does state facts and not opinions most of the time. This is a strong point. The second trait I noticed is a number of bloggers spend most of their time venting their spleen and stating opinion. I suppose there is an art to reading blog sites. I won't go on about the spelling mistakes (there are some blogs that read like neat Latin).

Were there any other highlights of JavaOne? The java.net community site was launched; I think it's a move in the right direction. I do wonder though how the well-established community will take to it. The first casualty I was notified about was that javagaming.org had moved its message boards to the new java.net site. There were many complaints that the message board postings were not available, but then all was well.

It was nice to see that James Gosling now has a blog of sporadic content. He also posted his blog software on the site (and the shell scripts to ftp/sftp the content; I can just see the Java purists staring into their coffee and muttering, "He used shell scripts," with complete distain). By doing this James also showed how to get the job done, neatly, cleanly, and the fastest route to a working model. So what if he uses shell scripts? It does the job perfectly and it inspires me to write some Windows batch scripts to do the same thing.

Blogs are here to stay but I have to question some of the content. As a reader I'm looking for fact, not opinion. At the time of writing there are only about five blogs I can say, hand on heart, that I read on a regular basis. Hopefully, reading the blogs of some of Sun's employees will reassure me that all is well in Javaland.

Blogs of Note