Another unexpected program change at JavaPolis brought us Oracle’s Omar Tazi (director of SOA evangelism and Chief open source evangelist) instead of Marc Fleury in Wednesday’s keynote session.

Unfortunately, a school example of how not to do a presentation. We got an hour-long talk of Omar clicking away on his laptop, showing All-New Oracle product after product, one enterprisey acronym after the other, all the while complaining about how little time he had left for his presentation (actually counting down the minutes). At the same time it’s sad to see the Web 2.0 revolution being enterprisified by companies like Oracle–and in name only, because the JSF+Ajax screens filled with components stacked from top to bottom, are all but what Web 2.0 has been about. Then again, knowing Oracle, I’ve probably been watching a demo of Web 2.0.13.10…

The Sun keynote provided more fun, even though I had already seen most of it at this year’s NLJUG JFall session: Simon Ritter’s Sun SPOT robot cars chasing eachother, and Angela Calceido’s cyberglove directing the mouse pointer in LookingGlass. We also saw a short promotion video with Richard Stallman giving praise to Sun’s open source move (he’s getting old… I thought heroes weren’t supposed to grow old…).

But before all that, Stephan Jansen started off with the usual JavaPolis introduction. Over 2800 attendants this year from all over the world, making the venue, MetroPolis, almost too small. There have been lots of small improvements this year; more food and free wifi being the most basic ones. Too bad that the free wifi and the dns server behind it are very hard to connect to. But what’s really a shame is that the speakers aren’t provided with a guaranteed working connection; several demos had to be cancelled because of that.

After the keynote we went downhill again, with a session on Apache Tuscany by a very (very) nervous Andrew Borley, poor guy. Sheet after sheet filled to the brim with bullets and text that was being read outloud almost literally. The technology itself is really interesting from a SOA point of view (an open source implementation of Service Component Architecture and Service Data Objects, supporting components written in any language like Ruby or Java, interoperable via SOAP or REST)–but really it hardly comes across this way. I’ll visit the website instead.