SIGS Publications throws a Javafest in the heart of Silicon Alley
New York City — Those who attended the First International Java Developers Conference sponsored by SIGS Publications (http://www.sigs.com), May 13 through 15, had to know they’d come to the right place when they encountered a sign in a storefront of the Crown Plaza Hotel that announced “Opening Soon: The Java Shop.”
The SIGS Conference was a Java shop in itself, offering a menu of keynotes, tutorials, technical roundtables, vendor displays, product presentations, and user-group meetings to about a thousand of the East Coast’s most sophisticated programming professionals.
“Walk-in traffic was better than we anticipated,” said Richard P. Friedman, president of SIGS, “I think the good attendance had a lot to do with pent-up demand in the developer community for advanced Java information. This conference is the first of its kind in the world. We recognized the need for it early on, and that is why we were able to be first to market. What’s interesting is this first Java conference is as large as our C++ and Smalltalk shows — and we’ve been holding those for five years.”
The stars turn out
The star turns of the show were the keynote addresses by Grady Booch of Rational Software, Miko Matsumura of Sun Microsystems, Jack D. Hidary of EarthWeb LLC, and Kim Polese of start-up Marimba Inc.
Booch, a pioneer in the application of object-oriented analysis and design methods (including one named after himself), gave a presentation entitled “Latte or Double Espresso — The New Breed of Developers in the Java Landscape.” His talk centered on the fact that with Java growing beyond the simple Web-applet stage and into the arena of large-scale application development, programmers will need to cultivate sophisticated object technology methods in order to insure total architectural control over projects.
