JavaOne Bejing December 2010

It was December 12, sunny morning in Prague when I packed couple of my thinks and went to the airport. Destination JavaOne in Beijing, China. Wishing no snow storm in Moscow I got on the plane and was looking forward to Beijing. It was only couple of minutes when I thought there is no way we could land on. It was a new "feature" from Aeroflot that shows image from camera situated in front of the plane on the screen on the seat in front of you. House, house, house, forbidden city, airport - a bit left, a bit right and then very quickly down towards concrete runway - there are some things I better watch when I am not on board :). 

Getting ready to start

My first time at such a big conference and my first time facing people asking "What is NetBeans?", "Where can I download it?", "Why is it better than Eclipse?", "Can I import Eclipse project into NetBeans?", "Can you debug in NetBeans?", "Can you debug Javascript in JSP pages?", "Does NetBeans support WebLogic?", "Does it have support for Struts, Hibernate ... ?", "Can I develop J2ME applications in NetBeans?" and many other questions which I was trying to answer ... and it was really hard job sometimes :). Well, now I can just hope that answers were good enough to many asking developers (often thanks to Geertjan) and they consider to switch from Eclipse or give NetBeans, obviously so much unknown IDE in China, a try at least. And if you wonder about answers then don't hesitate to follow links.

To be honest with you, I didn't spend all our time at the conference only, of course :). You can imagine how good tastes Tsingtao beer after such a day at the conference, even if it is a bit "waterish" :). A good time in the evenings was guaranteed since I had chance to have a dinner with Java evangelists and once when we weren't too tired we dropped in a cosy jazz bar in the city center. Well, 4 days is not enough :).

Terrence and Roger on Great Wall

Since China is kind of exotic for me, a guy from Europe, I considered as my obligation to see as much as possible it is to see in Beijing. And what you cannot miss once you are in China? Correct, Great Wall! :). So I went up there and after couple of minutes I was just starring for a while. Terrence and Roger recording podcast right on Great Wall of China!






And if you think about traveling to Bejing, here are some advices I picked up on the airport:
1. Bring some Euros or Dollars. You will need them in case ATM will decide not to give you money ;).
2. It is not as warm as you may think. And if you think +5 is still OK then forget about it in windy and humid Beijing.
3. Write down name and address of hotel in Chinese letters ;) 

It's really pity I had only 4 days at conference and then only 3 days off. But the country is marvelous and I'll be back :). So China, start using NetBeans and hope to see you guys at JavaOne once ;). 

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