Borland Software Corp.’s annual user conference, BorCon 2002, kicked off this week with company executives giving conference attendees a “license to code.”
Playing with the James Bond theme, vice-president of developer relations David Intersimone entered the stage wearing a tuxedo, shooting blanks into the audience from a prop gun, and highlighting 007-ish gadgets including wireless devices that benefit from Borland’s product line.
Joined for the opening keynote by Borland president and CEO Dale Fuller, “David I” likened the heated rivalry between Microsoft’s .Net strategy and Sun Microsystems’ J2EE initiative to the old Rock’em Sock’em Robots game, and proceeded in playing a match with Fuller.
True to Borland’s history of maintaining good relations with both Microsoft and Sun, the conference features keynote addresses by Anders Hejlsberg, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft and James Gosling, a vice-president and fellow at Sun. In a further show of Borland neutrality, the three laptops used to demonstrate applications during the keynote were models by Dell, IBM and HP.
“We are Switzerland,” Fuller said during the opening keynote.
The conference, designed specifically for Borland’s developer community, reflects what Fuller describes as Borland’s vision.
“It’s built by developers for developers,” he said.
The conference is scheduled to touch on such topics as Web services and the software industry, the mobile enterprise, application development in a world dominated by Java and .Net and the challenges of global development.
According to Borland customer and conference attendee, Frank Shen, a programmer for Seljax International Inc. in Stony Plain, Alta., the conference is a good opportunity to meet other members of the Borland community and look ahead to future implementations.
BorCon continues in Anaheim until Wednesday. For information on conference announcements, visit http://info.borland.com/conf2002/overview.html