It “s Monday morning. Yesterday “s registration to the hotel was painless. Or as they say these days, it was 2.0. There was an electronic kiosk in the lobby. Just swipe your credit card, then touch the screen to select a room: smoking/nonsmoking, number of beds and the floor (the floors higher then 12th cost more, but I was not sure if my employer would be too happy to pick up this extra expense for providing me a better view of San Franciso). Bum hellip;The room key came out from the slot. I was done in less than two minutes..

In the morning, I “ve arrived to the Moscone center to see yet another example of the Registration 2.0. First, to the speaker “s counter. The barcode reader scans a piece of paper that I “ve printed at home, a special machine spits out my JavaOne card with a special electronic key embedded in it. After that I “ve repeated the same procedure at the Press counter to get my press pass ndash; they promise a reception for the press, and it would be stupid to miss it.

The next destination is a nearby hotel to register for the NetBeans Software day. Let me tell you, I “ve got a little used to 2.0 stuff hellip; I found a long line of people wanted to register at the event. The first 400 people will get a free NetBeans book, so each of us (early birds) received a little red sticker, which supposedly will entitle me for the book. After the first 20 minutes of waiting in line I though of getting back to the Moscone center: they run Java University there. But then I saw the sign that Jonathan Schwartz is opening the event and James Gosling is closing. I decided to stay. This is clearly the registration 1.0. After coming closer to the registration tables I saw the food: pizza, corn chips, dry fruits and soft drinks. OK, OK, it “s Registration 1.5. Got my pass, got my food, now hunting for the place to sit. The premium spots are on the floor by electric wall outlets. Forget about it. Get real. No big deal. I still have 85% of my battery left.

Hear the music? They are opening the doors and about 800 people are slowly filling up the room hellip;The fact that that 400 of them won’t get that book gives me this nice warm feeling! Yes!

And Jonathan Schwartz gave a talk. He started witha joke that he was tired of being #2 and not #1. He’s repeated a couple of times that his (and McNealy’s ) credo: “Innovation Happens Elswhere “.

I guess, he meant to say that as soon as you start believeing that innovation happens in your company, you are moving in the wrong direction.

Then, he invited Rich Green to the podium opening up with the words that now the creativity is in the core of the development at Sun.

After a brief talk, they started an improvised Q/A session right on the podium and the first question Jonathan asked was this, “Rich, do you want to open source Java? “The audience started to laugh and applaud.

Rich answered that we need to keep the platform un-fractured and need to come up with the plan to maintain the brand, compatibility, and then, why not?

Jonathan: “What “s the best part of being back in Sun? ”

Rich: ” Amazingly brilliant and creative people. ”

Jonathan,: “There is no better and no more aggressive leader, than Rich Green “.

After this talk we saw a demo of a a Java ME rapid development, and then two guys from Google, Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter gave an entertaining demo on code illusions.

Tom Ball from Sun demoed a JackPot: a tool that runs in through the source code of your NetBeans project, suggests and performs refactoring for you.

Robert Brewing, Sun’s Distinguished engineer, got several minutes to talk about Sun Tools: NetBeans, Sun Studio, Java Studio Enterprise, Java Studio Creator and Mobility pack. All these tolls will be added to the NetBeans platform. NetBeans now supports C and C++ development. Sun keeps donating tools to the open source community, which will be added to the NetBeans platform.

From James Gosling’s talk I’ve memorized this phrase: it feels like dot com era again, except now people have business plans with some positive numbers in them.

Finally, Jason van Zil, the founder of Apache Maven project came to the stage talking about, well Maven. Every speaker at JavaOne is dressed casually. But Jason went a little bit over board. He was wearing a shirt and a black wool sweater and shorts with beach slippers. He must be suffering some kind of body temperature disorder when the upper body is freezing while the bottom part always remembers the last Hawaii vacation. Poor thing.

At the end of the event, there was a raffle of five iPods. Now I need to pick up my free USB memory stick and a book and we can call it a NetBeans day.