Sun Microsystems Inc is claiming that JavaOne is now the world’s largest programming conference. Attendance has shot up from 6,000 in 1996, up to 10,000 in 1997 and 14,000 last year. This year, there are 20,000 attendees, 800 speakers and 180 sessions. Sun quotes IDC figures which count 1.7m Java developers worldwide and predict that there will be 3m by 2002. Next year, the number of Java developers worldwide is expected to overtake the number of C++ developers. Forrester Research claims that 79% of Fortune 1000 companies now have Java developers in-house, and that figure will have risen to 100% by 2002. And Sun says that its Sun Developer Connections web support network, recently upgraded into a full-blown portal site, now has one million registered users, and is the second largest in the world and gaining on Microsoft Corp’s MSDN.
