I attended the Sun Tech Days 2008 in Melbourne today. It was a well
presented conference, with key international speakers from Sun
Microsystems presenting various technologies like Netbeans, Glassfish,
JavaFX, JRuby, SOA & BPEL, Rich Internet Applications using jMaki /
AJAX, etc. There was also a special appearance from James Gosling (via
satellite link) at the beginning of the program who talked about the
future of Java and his personal experiences with the language.

I was very disappointed that Sun did not include the full Sun Tech
Days 2008 program in Melbourne. The full program is available in
Sydney and I believe the attendees got most of the good prizes too.
Melbourne has the first part of the program (including the James
Gosling speech) via satellite only. It's such a shame because
Melbourne has more top Sun/Java expertise than any part of Australia.
The fact that Melbourne has to play second fiddle (in other words the
"bridesmaid") to Sydney is a very bad call on the part of Sun. Just my
personal opinion.

I hope that this can be rectified next year. Sun needs to understand
that Sydney is not the only internationally renowned Australian city
in the world.