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The Law of Lines


By Allen Holub
August 1, 2005 — 
Whatever checkout line you’re in is always the slowest, and if you move to a new line, the line you were just in speeds up and the new line slows down. That’s the Law of Lines.

The Conference Corollary of this universal law applies to conference sessions: Whatever session you’re in is always a dog, but if you session-hop, the one you leave turns great and the one you go to becomes awful.

Of course, my information about the good sessions comes from newly made friends who might be lying in order not to admit that they made a bad choice. Maybe all the sessions are bad. Maybe I just have a low threshold for boredom.

I bring up the Law of Lines because I’ve just come away from this year’s JavaOne, which provided many examples of the Conference Corollary. A couple of the sessions I went to were great, but most of them were what I’ve come to expect from large conferences: boring marketing fluff, technical sessions that were too short to be useful, or technical sessions that presented perhaps 10 minutes of useful material in a 90-minute format.

Matters were made worse by the build-up to the conference, which led me to believe that things would be different this year.

I was hoping for lots of education and less marketing. After all, most of the sessions were billed as tutorials, advanced how-tos or instructor-led hands-on labs.

Let’s start with the hands-on sessions. Sun set up a great hands-on room, loaded with computers and big enough to handle a good-sized group. “At last,” I thought, “they’ve taken the notion of education seriously.”

I was wrong. The room sat empty for most of the conference because Sun scheduled, at most, four hours of hands-on per day.

To make matters worse, with only one exception, every hands-on class was a NetBeans tutorial of some sort. This is like adding insult to injury—I really don’t understand why Sun insists on putting so much effort into NetBeans rather than working collaboratively with the rest of the industry on Eclipse.

Eclipse, unlike NetBeans, is surrounded by a lively open-source community that has made it into a superior development platform.

On the other hand, the NetBeans community is a very lonely place occupied only by Sun and those companies over which Sun has some leverage.

If Sun really wants to promote Java by building developer tools, it should be building world-class Eclipse plug-ins. It’s not as if NetBeans is a profit center.

Returning to the subject at hand, there’s absolutely nothing that Sun can do at JavaOne to persuade me (or anyone else) that NetBeans is a good thing, and wasting so much time trying to do just that detracts from the conference considerably.

That hands-on room could have been packed with happy programmers learning how to write real software in new ways.

I would have loved to have taken a Hibernate 3 tutorial or learned how to build a Tapestry or Spring application. A few years ago, I would have loved to have had someone guide me step by step though the processes of writing and deploying a Web app on Tomcat, or writing a custom JSP tag. Instead, I get NetBeans tutorials.

For a conference like JavaOne to be successful, it needs to be focused on education, not persuasion for Sun’s specific Java agenda.

It’s like when you pay good money to see a movie, but then are forced to watch 15 minutes of soft-drink commercials before the movie starts. I didn’t pay to watch ads, and I didn’t go to JavaOne to hear Sun-centric marketing hype disguised as a tutorial.

The only indicator of the quality of a conference is whether or not I came away from it knowing how to do something I didn’t know how to do when I went in. I want to learn new things—subjects that aren’t covered in the books. If it is in a book, I want to learn it faster, and get hands-on experience with it.

By this measure, this year’s JavaOne was a failure. Sun did have a few let’s-make-JavaOne-interesting brainstorming sessions, but I’m cynical about these amounting to anything as long as the marketing people are in charge.

Let’s hope for the best.

Allen Holub is an architect, consultant and instructor in C/C++, Java and OO Design. Reach him at www.holub.com.


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