Another year of rejections from JavaOne and I’ve finally written them back asking for comments on the selection process. The thing that is hardest to swallow about JavaOne and their selection is that the topics I submit are definitely viable and important topics. I’m not just saying that either, because both topics I’ve submitted have either gone on to be published in well known journals or have been accepted to other conferences.

So, there are a couple of situations:

1. My submission is lacking in descriptiveness and therefore the selection committee rejects it because they don’t understand what the presentation is about
2. The JavaOne selection and therefore the entire conference has given up on the hard problems or challenging topics
3. The JavaOne selection ignores anything that isn’t desktop, the latest JDK, the latest J2EE or the latest open source frameworks

I hate to think that JavaOne has given up on the challenging topics, but if you know me then you know I rarely cover the basics but love to work on and talk about the tough problems. So, it is possible that these topics just aren’t geared towards JavaOne. I really hope that isn’t the case.

What it really comes down to is either my submission is poor or JavaOne is only interested in the latest topics. I’m not against the latest and greatest thing out in the OS world nor the latest and greatest J2EE container or application but I’m just not going to present on those because they aren’t solving the tough problems like distribution, versioning, dependencies, deployment, configuration, runtime management, configuration migration, application migration, and much more. So, if JavaOne is truly gearing things towards the latest and greatest, I’ll just have to wait until the latest and greatest starts solving all the problems I’m attacking.