Thursday night was a lot of fun. I guess Smashmouth was playing but I don’t know anyone that went – anyone hear how it went? I was ready to relax a bit after my talk so it was a fun night. I went to dinner with some other NFJS speakers and had a great time and met some new people.

Then I headed to the the Guice BOF, which was a fun crowd. They talked about the upcoming Guice 2.0 and the interesting new features. Unfortunately, I’ve only played a bit with Guice so I can’t say that I found it personally meaningful, but it sounded like some good stuff. I thought the idea of using custom annotations was interesting. Plus they had copious quantities of beer.

Then it seemed like that whole crowd migrated en masse to the Java Posse BOF (also beer enabled from Atlassian). The Java Posse do a podcast of Java news of course and this was a live episode. They took a bunch of polls of the audience. Given the exuberant crowd, I’m not sure how much you can draw from the responses. :)

Some little tidbits that they threw out that I found interesting.

• Scala is the new Java – I know the posse love the Scala and I think it’s an amazing language but I’m just not seeing it as the “new Java”.
• Kindle runs Java – I guess it was unknown before that the new Kindle e reader device from Amazon runs Java (on Linux). Pretty cool
• What is Duke? – there was a brief discussion of what the Java mascot actually is. Someone said it’s based on the shape of the communicator device in Star Trek. None other than Josh Bloch said “Duke is the bastard child of a scrubbing bubble”. Sounded like an authoritative source to me.

I asked a question and got a free copy of the new Effective Java at the BOF, which I am quite happy about.

Overall a fun night! (I don’t think Smashmouth could have competed.)