Floris' Blog

The official start of JavaOne! During breakfast the noises from the keynote-hall became audible through the walls.
The keynote immediately started with an announcement of project DarkChat: a massive chatsystem, built using JavaFX and project DarkStar. Jonathan Schwartz (wearing a suit, including a tie, what’s going on?!?) then highlighted some of the accomplishments of the Java platform. Guest appearances of eBay, RIM (blackberry), Sony (on blu-ray), Verizon and Intel. After this exchange of pleasantries between companies, the JavaFX platform got its share. And as expected: the JavaFX TV platform announcement. I found it strange that the JavaFX 1.2 release (which is said to contain Linux support) was mentioned only in passing. The demo by Nandini Ramani showed a sweet new editor/authoring tool for JavaFX content: all visual, including wiring of properties. In this demo Nandini pre-announced (oops!) the Sun store: store.java.com
It is then properly announced with James Gosling on stage. The store allows us developers to sell applications to all those billions of Java users world-wide. As a sidetrack Jagex got to demo their game RuneScape, and the game gets Duke’s choice award.
Scott McNealy got on stage, a great video of the history of Java, followed by tshirt throwing/shooting.
Alice, an 3D environment to teach students programming, also won a Duke’s choice award.
Scott remained on stage, commenting on the dip in IQ remaining on stage when James Gosling and the person of Alice left the stage. He breaks the subject many attendees are anticipating: Oracle and Sun. After a few funny pictures (Java advertisements on the Oracle ship of the America’s Cup Race), Larry Allison was invited on stage. He stressed the commitment of Oracle to the Java platform (all products, except the database) are Java based, and he’d like to see AJAX development replaced by JavaFX and is sure all developers will thank Gosling for giving us JavaFX.
After Larry left the stage with some signal flags spelling JAVA, and Scott said some final words, all developers rose to give the Sun team a huge applause.

Since cloud-computing is likely to be the next big thing, I attended the session ‘Java Technology-Based Cloud Computing with GridGain’. It promised to be little talk, lots of code. The talk started with a breakdown of grid-computing and cloud-computing, stacking their definitions. Then quickly moved on to coding different things using GridGain, showing how easy running tasks on several nodes can be when using GridGain to do so.

The session ‘Real Time: Understanding the Trade-Offs Between Determinism and Throughput’ started with an introduction to what real time is, and the system provided by Sun. Unfortunately, the theoretical part of the talk failed to bring clarification. The second part, a customer case study, did a better job of addressing the issues involved.

With hardly time for a break (that’s the way it is at the first day of JavaOne: they’re really hard on us :-)) the keynote started. It touched on the evolution of the platform and moved on to JavaFX, its latest features and architecture. Then they showed project Kenai. Yesterday I already go to know the project a bit, but this presentation added some cool additions: There is a Netbeans plug-in to interact with project data (such as issue tracking) from within Netbeans. Continuous integration is now also officially announced as part of Kenai (currently only as a limited beta). Mark Reinhold took over the presentation to discuss the JDK7 features. The focus is on modularity and multi-lingual capabilities. The modularity features (project Jigsaw) are intended to decrease download size for people without broadband (apparently more than a few), as well as supporting constrained devices. He performed a lengthy but very clear demonstration of the functionality provided by Jigsaw. The multi-lingual functionalities are provided by project ‘the Da Vinci Machine’, which works on the invoke-dynamic feature to improve the performance of dynamic languages. Project Coin is the umbrella under which small language improvements are covered. This addresses for instance the long-winded generics declarations. Other improvements in JDK7 will be type annotations, concurrency and collections updates, more new I/O, G1 garbage collector, compressed 64bit pointers, and more. It didn’t show the new date and time API, though. Robert Chinnici took over on the Java EE platform. Key features there are the focus on ease of use, profiles and pruning, as well as extensibility. Key technologies are JAX-RS, JSF and asynchronous servlets. The pluggable extension libraries functionality looks likely to reduce some of the configuration work that should reside with the libraries instead of the application. The EJB3.1 spec will improve the usability even further, and Bean validation API will help in validation. Too many new developments! Finally, Cluedin.org launched as the site to organize parties and get-togethers during JavaOne.

Bill Venners talk ‘The Feel of Scala’ presented the Scala language really nice, by showing different features of the language and the advantages or possibilities of those features. I have been playing with Groovy the last weeks and found it intuitive to work with and in some important ways superior to JavaFX, but Scala’s static typing means ‘play with Scala’ might move closer to the top of my todo list.

‘Asynchronous I/O Tricks and Tips’ covered ways to use asynchronous I/O. The session covered many of the classes/interfaces of the API. It touched on the way to retrieve the result of an asynchronous I/O operation (one way is to use Future objects (the ones from java.util.concurrent), while the alternative is using a CompletionHandler), as well as the different classes for both file and network I/O. The second part discussed Grizzly and its use of the new API, plus the issues encountered.

Although I’m usually involved in JavaSE projects, some knowledge of developments in the EE space is helpful. The session ‘A Complete Tour of the JavaServer Faces 2.0 Platform’ provided info on the brand new version of JSF. The spec now provides support for AJAX, in an attempt to bring together the best elements from existing solutions in the various *faces libraries. Performance has been improved using partial state saving. There’s lots more: check out the new spec: changes are easily identifiable due to the colour coding used.

After half an hour, just time enough for a quick bite in the pavilion and getting an espresso-fix at Starbucks (necessary by then), the evening program with Birds of a Feather sessions starts. ‘Using Embedded Containers for EJB 3 Technology-Based Components’ looks at some reasons and options to embed an EJB container in your application instead of the other way around. The key difference being who gets to control the VM. The primary use-case is unit-testing, and it shows that this can really decrease the time spent in the regular build-deploy-test cycle. The second use-case is adding EJB3 functionality to a servlet container. This requires minimal configuration, is lightweight and can be used to transition from a servlet container to a full application server. The final use-case is embedding EJB3 in Swing/command-line applications, which might be fun to try sometime.

‘Inside the Sun Java Real-Time System’ provided details on the real-time Java system. It provided an excellent look at what real-time Java is intended for, its history etc directly from the experts.

The final session is the session with the JavaPosse. This was great fun, but for the details you’ll just have to watch for their JavaOne episode! :-)