I went to the Cape Town Sun Developer Day today. Other than having incorrect info about the venue (which was communicated to me only after I got to the wrong venue!), it went very well. The focus was on Java development and talks were given by Srikanth Raju, Simon Ritter (who has a Sun.COM blog) and Dr Doris Chen.

The most interesting talk for me was Simon Ritter’s coverage of the Sun JVM Garbage Collector, which included a nice overview of the different approaches to garbage collection and some tips on tuning the JVM for different types of applications and server enviroments.

No freebies unfortunately – all I left with was a Sun pen and notepad. Bah! They also skipped the session on the Java Desktop System (Sun’s SuSE-based Linux distribution), but all three presenters delivered their presentations using StarOffice and were running JDS.