JavaOne Day 3 Special Report 2005

We are again in that time of the year: JavaOne. Where all announcements are done, all products released, and the press gets all excited with Java numbers. I just wish we had more time to actually see all that's happening... I get the impression that many (most?) announcements just disappear and get no attention at all, in the middle of the flood of information...

As usual, lots of cool stuff. Boeing's unmanned airplane controled completely by Java code in the Pavilion opens up new possibilities for the Real Time Java technology. The many (many!) small devices -- from cell phones to PDAs -- seem to be everywhere, not only on the hands of the specialized vendors, but in all booths, and in attendees hands. The Java-based games area spotlights many products, mostly online games, bringing to the games arena all the collaboration support that exists on Java.

Talking about collaboration, if you have not tried the NetBeans collaboration tools, you should. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz said that Eclipse was the best thing that happened to NetBeans, and the competition really did make the NetBeans community stand up for the challenge. I'm an old fan of NetBeans, and more and more it seems that my choice was a correct one. Other collaborative technologies like JXTA and Jini seem to be doing very well. Maybe you didn't see this before, but a couple of months ago the Jini team released the technology as open source, under the Apache License, making it even easier to incorporate Jini into your application. What I hear here at JavaOne is that this has created a very positive atmosphere around the technology. This is excellent; Jini is a wonderful distributed technology that deserves attention, especially now that it is even more open.

Licensing is always a hot subject, especially at JavaOne. Sun has announced their implementation of the J2EE spec as open source under the CDDL license. Some people have raised concerns about how much good this will bring, since we already have other open source implementations. I guess people just have to complain about something right? The more open source we have the better -- competition is good even in the open-source space. Congratulations to Sun and the team that pulled this through. Of course this raises the obvious other question about the licensing (or the eventual relicensing) of the J2SE (now re-branded as Java SE) implementation. No news in this area, although Schwartz said in a press conference that "We [Sun] will eventually open source all our code", but he added the caveat of "if and when it makes sense". That's fine, Sun can always join in when and if they want. In the mean time, we will keep working on the open source implementations, and tomorrow we'll even have an Apache Harmony talk. Competition is always good.

About the keynotes, the best one so far has been Scott's keynote yesterday. I know I'm very biased, since Brazil was mentioned several times, but the several applications shown were great. Of course (and I'm even more biased now), the best one was the Brazilian Health Care application. Fabiane Nardon, who besides being the principal architect of the project also leads the Java Tools Community, represented Brazil very well on stage. The project itself already has a positive direct impact on Brazil's health situation and it seems that soon it will be impacting other countries' as well. Scott's keynote also ended with a nice and sensible tribute to James Gosling, and a celebration for the 10 years of Java. Happy Birthday Java, we're now starting the next 10 years!

All in all, my impressions of JavaOne this year are very positive. For me the most important things are as always talking to people and JavaOne excels at that. It is not over yet, but since no one announces anything on the last day most of the excitement has probably passed already. The show will close tomorrow with James Gosling; that's always something to look forward to, especially his demos. A little before they close the doors of the show, I'll have a chance to give my presentation. Maybe after that we'll figure out what all the announcements really mean. For now, there's still a lot of JavaOne to go!

Abracos,
Bruno Souza
www.javaman.com

Samples from the JavaOne Day 3 Photo Gallery

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

First of all, I would like to thank M7 Corporation, makers of the NitroX Eclipse plugins for JSF, JSP, and Struts development. Today at JavaOne, M7 donated a license for NitroX to the Serengeti Lion Project that I work on for development of our web applications to support our lion research in the Serengeti National Park.

On other issues,. I was looking at the book sales statistics for the bookstore here at JavaOne, and there are some interesting trends. In the #1 slot, is Java Puzzlers by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter, which is no doubt at least partially driven by the fact that the writers of Java Puzzlers have given some of their Java Puzzlers presentations here at JavaOne. As always, these puzzle presentations are excellent. We have one of their presentations from Javaopolis available on Javalobby.

Interestingly, in second place, is the book “Swing Hacks”, by Joshua Marinacci and Vincent Massol. Does this indicate a heightened interest in Java on the desktop? I personally was somewhat surprised to see a book on GUI development as the second best selling book here at JavaOne.

The book “Hibernate in Action” by Christian Bauer and Gavin King came in at sixth place. Hibernate seems to be one of the hot topics here, as also evidenced by the fact that the Hibernate 3 technical session I wanted to attend was completely full when I got there. Even the overflow room was full.

Walking around the Pavilion, the Eclipse booth is also generating a fair amount of interest. Eclipse released version 3.1 yesterday and the download site is swamped.

I also attended a technical session on layout managers in Swing. Check this out, it ’s hilarious

The After Dark Bash starts tonight at 7:00. On the tenth anniversary, there are some big names here for that, including Dennis Miller, and “five special guests who happen to be world famous rockers”. Apparently Sun is trying to keep it a secret who they are. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it is U2, based on the work that Sun did with Bono’s Africa projects. I guess we will see later tonight if I am right or not.

Kind Regards,
Mike Urban
murban@javalobby.org

Oracle's evening event Tuesday showed that a little bad planning can go a long way.

At their Pavilion booth, they had the "Revenge of the Sith" game running and offered attendees who filled out a dense survey card [and saw a demo] a free ticket to a showing of the recent movie of the same name on the local IMAX screen. But Murphy's Law prevailed.

First they started late. Then the tech, probably not a regular at the theatre, couldn't dim all the house lights. Catcalls and hisses went up from the audience.

We had a huge screen rendition of the opening space battle with pounding music, and explosions, and.... silent actors. There was Anakin apparently whispering to R2D2.

More Boos....

The tech stopped and restarted the film several times with long pauses. On the 4th try, the film began to jitter and single frame and.... ZAP!! .... the frame melts in lurid color. Long pause, followed by Oracle reps assuring us they will fix the film and start at the beginning.

After another long pause.... the film starts after the pause after the meltdown and the sound is still crippled. Projector goes off and they run a testing program for the speakers..... which work fine.

There are more announcements, but finally the disaster is realized by the Oracle staff and they agree to show Batman Begins instead [and give us tickets for a return to the theatre]. But that's about an hour after the "Sith" should have started. So we missed a late BOF and maybe a few parties....

I'd guess the arcane art of film splicing has been lost to the current generation. And I might not want Oracle managing my DataCenter.