Sun will be kicking off its CommunityOne conference from June 1-3 at Moscone Center. The first day of CommunityOne is free, followed by in-depth paid training workshops on June 2 and the full-blown JavaOne conference from June 2-5. CommunityOne is part conference and part "un-conference," meaning there are a range of topics open to discussion and exploration, but it's a participative event, rather than a spectator sport. So you should bring ideas that you want to share and explore. Dave Douglas, VP of cloud computing at Sun, and John Fowler, VP of Systems, will kick off the general sessions at CommunityOne.
There are more than 50 different topics on the agenda, but if you can't find what you're looking for, there's room to create new sessions on the fly. Some of the major themes at CommunityOne include cloud computing (and a special CloudCamp un-conference), Web platforms, mobile development, open source software, and more.
[ Find out more about CloudCamp in whurley's interview with founder Dave Nielsen. | Keep up on the latest open source developments with InfoWorld's open source topic center and newsletter. ]
The second day of CommunityOne has in-depth tutorials on Web services, virtualization, MySQL, JRuby, DTrace, Open Solaris, and so on. There are also several hands-on labs where you can test out the cloud technology and Eclipse plug-ins for GlassFish, to name just two. Registration for CommunityOne also gets you into the exhibits pavilion at JavaOne.
CommunityOne is a great conference in its own right, but it's also part of a lead-in to the much larger JavaOne conference, which has more than 100 technial sessions listed in the catalog (PDF) and as many BOFs, panels, and labs focusing on Java, as well as many other related technologies such as SOA, JavaScript, JavaFX, AJAX, Scala, Spring, Zembly, Maven, Groovy, real-time computing, embedded systems, 3-D graphics, and just about any other topic you could imagine.
If you're looking to retool your skills to new technologies, CommunityOne and JavaOne could be just what you're looking for.