Sometimes it takes thirteen years for a market to develop

This is been a week for trips down memory lane: renewing old friendships and product ties. The first was on Monday, as I was at JavaOne working in the Datalogics booth, as they are now selling Adobe's Java PDF Toolkit. What made this memorable was that I was manning a booth 13 years ago as Adobe test launched our "Adobe Acrobat Viewer for Java." I wore the same shirt for part of the day and the picture (even with terrible backlighting and underexposure). All told there were five PDF vendors at JavaOne: I was impressed. The conference did seem to be booming, with the infusion of Big Data and Spring. It was not the giant conference from the starry-eyed days of fifteen years ago for Java, but certainly did seem to be a sustainable business.

One company, ICEsoft, was even selling a Java-based PDF viewer, ICEpdf.   While it wasn't clear that this was a major moneymaker for them, it did show that there was a market. It's just not clear that Adobe would've been willing to wait 13 years for the market to develop. 

A second and related Java development is that I am now consulting with Datalogics to aid the commercialization of Adobe's Java PDF toolkit and Reader Extensions for customers who choose to embed the Java PDF toolkit. Best why I was in the Datalogics booth and then contributing to their new blog, where I will be a regular contributor.

I am working on new things as well, but that will be described in the near future.