JavaOne Day 1 Special Report 2005

There is a strong air of excitement about the future of Java here at JavaOne on the 10 th anniversary of Java. As far as early statistics goes, there about 15,000 people in attendance here the Moscone Center. Throughout the conference, there will be 174 technical sessions, 158 Bird of a Feather sessions, and 44 Hands On sessions.

The day started off early at 8:30 with a multimedia extravaganza of visual effects on screens several times wider than movie screens, sound bites, and live electronica music, all provided by the band Magnetic Poets. Do these guys produce CDs? They were awesome. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information about CDs on their Web site. Looks like they provide entertainment strictly for corporate events.

One of the things I found most interesting was a real time Java application by Boeing. Although most programmers do not need real time capabilities, a few niche markets like aviation do. For a long time, the standard thinking has been that Java was too slow, or not responsive enough for real time applications. Back during the days of Java 1.2, who would have taken the idea of developing a real time application in Java seriously? However, a project being shown here by Boeing proves that real time Java is not only feasible, but very powerful. The ScanEagle drone aircraft is a test vehicle for a reconnaissance drone flown by a pilot written in real time Java. But ScanEagle goes much further than that. Unlike current drones though that require either remote piloting by a human pilot with a joystick, or manual entry of waypoints, the ScanEagle can carry an avionics payload that monitors battlefield conditions in real time, and automatically updates its flight plan in real time based on that real time data. The result is that ScanEagle can be deployed to a battlefield and flown with without any human intervention or human analysis of battlefield data. How cool is that? This really goes to show how much progress has been made, and how much Java has advanced in such a short time. Quite impressive.

Of course, one of the biggest areas for Java is J2ME and Java on handheld devices. With over 2.5 billion Java enabled handsets out there, this is an industry of truly staggering size. I saw a really cool J2ME application running on a cell phone (not yet released), that allowed you to take a picture with a camera phone, and automatically post the picture to your blog with a single press of a button. To make it even more interesting, the phone will automatically notify you with a text message if someone responds to the blog entry.

During the keynotes, there was also a cool demonstration of a module that allows WYSIWYG design of portlets and SOA. The module lets you create SOA applications visually by dragging, dropping, and drawing a line between the various components to connect them. The code generation feature writes literally thousands of lines of code for you that would otherwise have to be coded manually. As an example of just how big of a productivity boost this can give, an application written internally without the component took a team of programmers on the project six months to write. Writing the application using the WYSIWYG module took a single programmer only two days!

Of course, there was also no shortage of announcements on the first day of JavaOne.

Kind Regards,
Mike Urban
murban@javalobby.org

Art at JavaOne

View these photos of the art at JavaOne at Javalobby's photo gallery. This is the second year that Sun and StartSoma, a San Francisco gallery, have hosted "Java Art." Six artists have been invited to share their vision of Java technology, and the works will be sold at auctions benefitting the Sun Microsystems Foundation. One cool aspect of this is that the artists are creating their work publicly right in the JavaOne Pavilion, so we can watch them work! This is also an unusual way to invite other people with creative vision to engage in the Java dialogue. I have to admit though, it is much more interesting to watch an artist paint than to watch a programmer program! Check out these photos of William "Vulcan" Crutchfield with his work titled "The Ambiguousness of Technology", Casey O'Connell with her untitled peice, and Eric Orr with his image of technology spreading from the mag stripe into the beyond (left to right)

IBM and Sun Sign 11 Year Agreement
Although tensions have been somewhat high between IBM and Sun recently, it seems the two companies have settled their differences. IBM and Sun announced today that they had signed an 11 year agreement that will have IBM’s entire middleware stack running on Solaris for both Sparc and AMD systems.

Blue Ray Disk Chooses Java as Standard for Interactive Content:
The Blue Ray Disk association announced today at JavaOne that it has chosen Java as the standard for interactive content delivered on Blue Ray disks. Blue Ray is the future of media storage systems, allowing a disk the size of a DVD to hold up to 200 Gb of information. Current implementations can store 50 Gb. Panasonic believes Blue Ray will be the next big area of Java development, providing a great many opportunities for Java programmers. In the future, DVD players will have JVMs built into them for running the application content encoded on Blue Ray disks. Blue Ray has the backing of many of the large consumer electronic companies such as Panasonic and Sony. In addition, it has the backing of major Hollywood studios including MGM.

Sun Offers Subscription Based Service to all Development Software for Low Price. Workstation Included.
Sun announced today at JavaOne that it will be offering a subscription based service to all of its development tools including Java Studio Creator. The best part? It includes one of the most powerful workstations available--The new Sun Ultra 20, a dual core AMD Opteron Workstation running Solaris 10. And the price? Only $29.95 per month with a three year agreement. There is also a 90 day trial period. Where you can return the workstation and software for no cancellation penalty. One of the most powerful workstations available, and use of Sun’s entire development suite for only $29.95 a month? Sounds like a great bargain! I think I will ask my boss to get me one! (That would be you Rick :) )

GlassFish Will be Available under CDDL.
It seems the original reports about GlassFish being released under the JRL were not entirely accurate. It was announced today that GlassFish will in fact be released under the much more liberal CDDL. The CDDL is an OSI approved license that is based on the Mozilla Public License. So it seems GlassFish is really going open source!

JBI 1.0 Released as Open Source
Sun announced today that the JBI specification has been approved and the 1.0 specification is being released today. The specification is being released as an open standard that anyone can implement. JBI will provide a unified interface for Java Business Integration. 20 vendors, including BEA, IBM and others have all announced that they will produce middleware products that implement JBI.

Contrary to Rumors, Java Growth is NOT Slowing.
It seems there is no shortage of rumors out there that interest in Java is waning, and that Java growth has slowed down. However, these rumors seem to be unfounded. There are nearly 2.5 billion Java enabled handsets out there now, a growth rate of 42% per year. For the first time, the number of Java Enabled handsets has exceeded the number of Java enabled Pcs. In addition, the number of Java developers is growing at a rate of 12% per year. According to these numbers, Java growth rate is not slowing at all, but is actually up.

Caucho Technology Celebrates 4000 Resin Customers
Caucho Technology, makers of the Resin application server announced today that they have reached the 4000 customer mark. Some users of the J2EE licensed server include Javalobby, Ebay, Cnet, NTT, Evite, and the American Red Cross.

“Caucho Technology is excited to have reached our 4000th customer license,” said Steve Montal, Director of Sales and Strategic Partnerships at Caucho. “Our core focus is on providing excellence in software design and support for our customers, and we are delightful to have reached this milestone.”

Samples from the JavaOne Day 1 Photo Gallery

View these photos and many more from JavaOne 2005 at Javalobby's photo gallery...