Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Keeping up to date in Java

It's that time of year again - the annual Java love-in in San Francisco. Due to work commitments, I can't get to Java One this year, although to be honest, I'm looking for a more advanced conference anyway - a lot of the JavaOne sessions are targeted as "101" sessions. Still, there's already been a flurry of announcements that I want to digest to see if they affect our product architecture moving forward. Some look exciting - more on that later.

Keeping up to speed with JavaOne also raises a wider issue - how to keep up to speed with the Java technology platform in general. With Sun looking like they are going to really up the ante on new additions to the J2SE, J2EE and J2ME platforms, it's going to get more and more time consuming.

Push technologies - e.g. RSS feeds for blogs and key web sites are a great help. Good blogs are hard to find though, and I tend to use blogs to generate new ideas or areas to explore - I don't buy opinions that are expressed in a blog without doing my own R&D first - the writing style tends to be polemic in order to attract an audience / get a reaction as opposed to even-handed and impartial.

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