Japan Tour
My Japan tour is starting to come to an end. During the past week I have been traveling in Japan, done two general sessions at BEA Tech Day 2005 conferences (Tokyo and Osaka), plus a press conference and a bunch of BEA internal training sessions.
I had never been to Japan before, but I am very interested in their culture and I love Japanese food, so this trip has in many ways been a very interesting and fun experience. I had some fears that my visit would turn out similar to the movie 'Lost In Translation' by Bill Murray (for those that have seen this movie), but my fears were unfounded. Most people spoke good english and I only met very generous people with a lot of heart.
Excitement around AOP
There is a lot of excitement and interest around AOP in Japan, both among developers, management and press. They are especially excited about AspectWerkz (it is actually more popular than AspectJ) and JRockit support for AOP.
It was fun to learn that they had translated every single article I have written, to Japanese. On the other hand, the problem having to translate almost every article and book is one of the biggest hurdles on the way to mass adoption of AOP.
Press conference
The press conference I did was an interesting experience, it was my first real press conference, with interviewers lined up, pounding me with questions. It was a lot of fun. The topic for the interview was JRockit and its new AOP support which they seemed very impressed about.
They have already published, two articles based on the press conference:
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/news/200508/31/bea.html
http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/free/NC/NEWS/20050830/167117/
and from what I understand, two more articles with the published.
BEA Tech Day 2005 in Tokyo
The general session I did had around 350 attendees and was simultaneously translated. Things worked out pretty well. People seem to like the talk and came up with a bunch of really good questions at the end. What was even more fun was that there were actually other speakers that talked about AspectWerkz/AspectJ in different contexts. One guy for example, talked about how to implement the transaction and dependency injection parts of the EJB 3 specification using AspectWerkz. In general, one of the main themes of the conference was AOP.
Afterwards, during the conference party, I was treated almost like a celebrity, with "fans" coming up and wanted to shake hands and have a picture taken with the mysterious AOP guru from the north pole (Sweden). :-)
Seasar framework - a Japanese Spring killer?
During lunch at the conference I had the pleasure of having interesting discussion with the founder of the dependency injection and component framework Seasar. For those that have never heard about Seasar, Seasar is a project very similar to Spring, which is more popular than Spring here in Japan. It uses plain bytecode manipulation to do the AOP part (and not proxies), and is based on the AOP Alliance interfaces. One cool thing that I found out about the project is that they are not only using but are very excited about Alex's and my project backport175 (so much that they actually asked to contribute back some code).
BEA Tech Day 2005 in Osaka - Kyoto sightseeing
Today I am off for Osaka for my last talks at the BEA Tech Day 2005 in Osaka tomorrow. The trip will conclude with one day off, which I will spend sightseeing in Kyoto. Kyoto is the historical and cultural center in Japan, with many buildings and temples being more than 1000 years old (compared to Tokyo which is only a couple of hundred years old). So that is going to be interesting.