Openworld Day 4 – ‘Sun’ Day

Although I am at ‘Oracle’ Openworld, I happened to spent most of the day listening to the Sun guys, Scott McNealy and James Gosling.

Scott McNealy had a keynote that as is normal at Openworld, overflowed way beyond the capacity of Hall D at Moscone. Scott spoke about how this is the participation age where everyone gets to participate in the development of IT. He later spent some time unveling new servers from Sun that offer better performace and consume less power.

Actually one of the refreshing new ideas at Openworld has been the concept of “Performace Per Watt”. Intel CEO Paul Otellini spoke about PPW yesterday in his keynote and the same idea again surfaced in the Sun keynote.

It seems that the software of today has got “fast enough” hardware, so the hardware vendors instead of getting into which machine is the fastest are focusing on other things like conserving power. The developed world rationale behind consuming less power is that power costs a lot of money. However power conservation isn’t a cost saving option but a survival option in the developing world where power shortage is more the rule than the exception. So less power hungry machines is good for developing countries and the environment.

As for Java related stuff in the day, James Gosling had a session about SOA. James Gosling the star of the Java world, who has 1000s in for his keynotes at JavaOne got a relatively small room and a fairly small audience. Just goes to show that although Oracle has ventured into Java in a big way, the Oracle community still isn’t quite Java savvy.

Gosling presented SOA and how Sun was approaching it. What was good about the session was that unlike many other SOA session, Gosling did not get carried away saying that SOA will change the world.

Related:
>> OpenWorld Day 2-3: BPEL, Fusion and JDeveloper
>> Oracle OpenWorld Day 1 – Xtreme weekend – EJB3 and Annotaions