JavaOne is all about interesting demos, latest buzz around Java and some painful marketing talks. I didn't attend JavaOne this year, but I've read a few stories online about the different keynotes, demos and followup discussions. I just finished a conversion with a group of friends/colleagues who attended JavaOne 2008 and most of them enjoyed the show.
One interesting session at JavaOne 2008 was hosted by Raghavan aka Rags from Sun Microsystems. The session was called the Script Bowl and was a war between the scripting gurus from Groovy, JRuby, Jython and Scala. All the four languages are dynamic scripting languages that run on the JVM. LaForge represented Groovy, Nutter represented JRuby, Wierzbicki represented Jython and Jorge Ortiz represented Scala. All four showcased excellent skills and I watched the video one of my friends had taken.
And like the Idol (American - Indian whatever...), there was SMS voting and it was awesome competition between the scripting languages and their crowd of supporters watching the session. Finally JRuby won the day and it was a close fight. JRuby won big points at Round 3 (Best Language Features). You can read the full competition details and look below for the result details:.
A = Groovy; B = JRuby; C = Jython and D = Scala
