Code One Preview: JavaOne v2, Gosling & Blockchain Beer

If you had to rank the many changes the Java community has seen over the past few years, the rebranding of a developer conference probably wouldn't make the top 10. But Oracle's decision to expand the menu of languages, frameworks, tools and tech covered at what was the annual JavaOne event, now called Oracle Code One, which gets underway next week in San Francisco, ain't nothin'.

In fact, it could be considered a kind of manifestation of a Java landscape increasingly infiltrated by new languages and not-so-Java tools -- many of which are quickly becoming essential additions to the Java Jock's gym bag.

That's kinda the way Stephen Chin explained it to me last week. Chin is the director of the Developer Community Team at Oracle (and a former JavaOne Rock Star), and he's the current Conference Content Chair, a role he also played for past JavaOne conferences.

"This is a trend that has been going on for several years," he said of the non-Java content in this year's show. "Now we're changing the conference name to match what has become a very broad developer conference."

As I reported earlier, Oracle is billing the change as "an expansion of tracks to include more languages, technologies, and developer communities." This year's conference program includes three tracks dedicated to Java content exclusively: a Java core track, which comes straight from the Java technology team; a server-side Java track, which covers the backend server-side use cases for Java, "including both the things we do at Oracle and things from the broader Java community," Chin said; and a Java ecosystem track, which is chaired by, Jonathan Giles, who works for Microsoft.

But for the first time, the conference will include content aimed at two different developer communities: those building databases-focused apps and MySQL developers. The program also includes sessions on such languages as Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript, and R.

"We're not taking away any significant Java content from the show," Chin said. "We adding to it."

The big events are also on the schedule: In the very popular Java technical keynote on Monday, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group, and Georges Saab, VP of Development, are set to talk about Java SE updates from the last 12 months, including Java 11, as well as "future projects aimed at accelerating user productivity, such as Java in container environments and exploration of new code review options for the JDK."

The Duke's Choice Awards are still part of the conference, the winners of which will announced during the technical keynote. But there's a new prize on the program called the Groudbreakers Award. Where Duke's Choice is aimed at projects, Groundbreakers recognizes influential developers in the community, Chin explained. In fact, "Groundbreakers" is a new "developer engagement brand," Chis said, which is why all the demos will be happening in the Groundbreakers Hub, and Oracle is promoting a new class of expert, called Groundbreaker Ambassador.

The Code One conference has 500 speakers on the schedule, Chin said, including a surprise addition to the community keynote on Wednesday: the father of Java himself, James Gosling. Chin will be there, too, along with Heather VanCura, Director at Oracle and Chair of the Java Community Process.

This year's Fireside Chat brings together some other industry icons, including: Doug Cutting, co-creator of Hadoop; Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO of Apache Kafka; Charles Nutter, co-leader of JRuby, Graeme Rocher, creator of Grails and Micronaut; and Guido van Rossum; creator of Python.

The great news about the chat is, attendees will get a chance to ask these luminaries questions during an audience Q&A.

And then there's the Blockchain Beer demo. There are a half dozen cool demos planned for the event, but this is the one, not surprisingly, generating the buzz.

For this demo, Oracle instrumented the entire operation of a Bay Area brewer, Alpha Acid Brewing Company, with IoT sensors, and coordinated with its suppliers (GigaYeast in San Jose, Admiral Malting in Alameda, and a hops farm in Gilroy) to collect data into a distributed blockchain ledger. The result: a QR code on the labels that, when scanned, shows the full history of the beverage, from farm to bottle.

"One of the things I love about doing projects like this is they expose small businesses doing interesting things," Chin said. "GigaYeast, for example, is working with local universities on specific strains of yeast that generate flavors and essences that taste like hops, so you get a hoppier beer without adding more hops.

Oracle was written up in the San Francisco edition of Eater, on this project, which I'm sure is a media first for Oracle.

The first official Oracle Code One keynote is set for Tuesday. Matt Thompson, Oracle's VP of Developer Engagement and Evangelism will be presenting. He'll be joined by Amit Zavery, Executive, Vice President of Fusion Middleware and PaaS Development at Oracle, and Siddhartha Agarwal, Group Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for Oracle Cloud Platform. The keynote will "explore topics ranging from managed Kubernetes and serverless functions to blockchain and intelligent digital assistants powered by chatbot technology," the company said.

Lots of other stuff to see and do at this year's show, including the big CloudFest concert on Wednesday night. You won't even notice the rebranding.

Oracle CodeOne, which runs Oct. 22-25, will be held at Moscone West.

Posted by John K. Waters on October 16, 2018