Just two weeks until Sun’s major Field Technologist get together – the Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) 2007.

This is a yearly event – being held in Las Vagas this year – and virtually in Second Life.

Over 3,600 Sun Customer Engineers and around 300 Sun Partners from around the world will meet in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The event always feature keynotes from Sun executives but this year will also include Industry leaders too.

There will be a ton of things going on during the event – all around field focused, customer engineering.

Apparently it will “deliver critical training with focused technical tracks and breakout sessions”, plus there will be “a demo pavilion, and abundant networking opportunities for all participants”.

The real highlight for me will be seeing Andy Bechtolsheim:

The Value of Design: Sun’s Systems Launch

Join John Fowler and Andy Bechtolsheim on Tuesday, October 9th, at the launch of the next-generation CoolThreads servers and blade designed for virtualization. You will also hear about the latest Sun systems based on the Intel and AMD quad-core processors, and innovations in storage and software that more easily enable virtualization and web-scale computing.

And to all my friends going to the conference – see you there !

Yesterday (Thursday the 3rd of May) we were lucky enough to have Tim Bray – Sun’s Director for Web Technologies – in the London City office.

Tim’s been over to the UK to make some customer visits, mainly amongst the Finance Sector in the City, where the rapid development of applications to reduce time to market for systems is a principal topic. Lucky for us he had a free afternoon to present, at very short notice, to a number of the Sun UK Customer Engineering team (UK Field Operations).

Tim’s famous for a whole host of web related innovations and notable contributions to the Internet Age, not least being a co-inventor of XML (along with Jon Bosak, the “Father of XML”, Sun “Contrarian Minds” entry here).

You can find Tim’s blog here, his Sun Bio. here, some more from Sun here, and his Wikipedia entry over here.

Tim gave a great talk on his views on Web 2.0, the state of of Dynamic Languages, Atom (Tim’s Chairman of the IETF working group – link to the Atom Standard Wikipedia entry here) and about REST.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer – basically the fashion for lightweight and extremely scalable web services based around XML & HTTP. It’s use is actually endemic across the Internet, and it’s an application architectural model which I fully support and champion, especially as I’ve used it in implementation a number of times (does this make me a “RESTafarian” ?).

As I’m such a technology fan-boy I was extremely pleased to find Tim was very approachable and friendly (don’t get me onto the time I met Andy Bechtolsheim, and got so starstruck I couldn’t speak).

Tim’s got some really valid things to say especially regarding time to market and the rapid development of applications – I’d recommend having a look at his site, and getting in touch with him if you’d like to know more.

P.S.

Apologies for the title – I couldn’t resist.