I have registered for the JavaOne 2007 conference in San Francisco this May and am really looking forward to it. I bought the Conference Plus pass which means I go a day early to attend a one full day class on secure web services using JAX-WS, SAAJ, etc... very useful.

I've managed to convince some people at work to install Centric CRM and Collab.Net on test computers to evaluate them. Once both are fully installed we'll get everyone involved in evaluating. So far the people who have tried them or at least read about them are really excited. There have been a few issues with Centric CRM. It appears that we'll have to wait until mid-summer to get some of the fixes in the upcoming 5.0 beta. However, there are work arounds for some issues, and others are not critical. I'm really excited about what these two systems can do for IJW.

The other day a head hunter emailed me offering a job with a Global 50 company. They need a Solaris admin familiar with Sun Directory Server. I was quite pleased that keywords in my blog have made me rank higher and that she found me because of that. I talk about Solaris a lot :) I had to tell her that I'm a computer programmer, not a network administrator, and am not looking for an other job. Also, I'm just getting started with Solaris and LDAP.

Speaking of Solaris, I purchased a Solaris 10 book to help get me started. I bought two computers almost a year ago to be servers, and the setup I want requires Solaris. I've put off plans for a new JRoller blog, Centric CRM, Collab.Net, Scalix, Sun Directory Server, etc... all this time because I've been waiting for Solaris. Hopefully by the end of Spring I'll have things set up perfectly.. we'll see.

NetBeans 5.5.1 beta and Sun App Server 9.1 beta are out now. I'm looking forward to the final releases this April. There are tons of bug fixes in NetBeans including bugs that I found and reported. The new app server supports clustering and fixes file locking issues in Windows when re-deploying EAR files. I'm sure there are more new features but those are the features I'm most interested in. Learning about clustering will be a whole new learning curve I'll have to fit in sometime. I believe that making your system able to scale up using clusters or grids is one of several requirements in order to call your system an "Enterprise Application". It should be capable of working for 5 users, 5,000 users, 50,000 users, etc..

The Java journey continues. I now know that it will take several more years before I will be happy calling myself a senior java programmer. There is so much to know about architecture and libraries. I can't wait for an other year to go by, hopefully by then I won't be reading books one after the other year round. I said that last year too :/

Today at work I was talking with a couple programmers about making a new blog site or website called OneStopJava.com (which is taken already, but has no website). I can think of many things I have spent days researching, or read entire books on that can be summarized in an article or tutorial. I think that it would be great to have a site with real issues using current libraries. Often I find myself researching the wrong thing because last year that standard was made obsolete and replaced by a new one... or, that works great in Java 1.4 but in Java 1.5 it's done differently. I think I've lost hair over some of these issues (too bad stress doesn't make you lose back hair :).