JavaOne Special Report 2007

Throughout the week, I had the opportunity to meet with many companies and hear just what they were showing at JavaOne.  This year, unlike past years, I felt that the theme of the companies in the pavilion was really "how to get stuff done".  It wasn't so much about the glittering things (although there was plenty of that), but more focused on how to make developers more productive and solve the problems they're having. 

First up, we have Agitar.  These guys weren't new to JavaOne, but when I first noticed them a year or two ago, their testing plugin for Eclipse was missing one thing that the lazy developer in me really needed - test generation.  This year, they've given in to the lazy developer in all of us, and put together a fairly advanced test generation system.  The system basically analyzes your code and generates a number of tests based on the complexity of your code.  In addition, they have a free solution where you can upload your code to their system and have them run your tests on a cluster of servers.  It's a pretty neat way (especially with the integration into Eclipse) to get a taste of what they can do. 

IceSoft is another old-timer at JavaOne and this year they were showing off their IceFaces JSF Ajax components again.  This year they were showing off their latest release, 1.6 DR4.  In this latest release, they've fixed a number of bugs and security holes and added a number of new features including an accordion component and complete support for JBoss SEAM.  In addition, their community has really grown, adding thousands of new members each month and have had over 150,000 downloads.  Perhaps JSF usage is starting to pick up?

Gemstone was an interesting surprise this year.  I wasn't very familiar with their software and was intrigued to hear abut the possibilities that their grid software can provide.  Using some intelligence, they can essentially keep the grid constantly efficient, shifting data around to be useful to the closest node.  In addition, their grid can be used both embedded in JavaEE applications and also as a standalone server.  It also as the ability to interact with Java, .Net, and C++ applications, transparently binding and object in one language to any of the others as they are needed. 

Oracle had more interesting news than I expected this year.  Aside from acquiring Tangosol (and apparently many other companies), their Fusion group has been very busy.  What many people don't know is that Oracle has actually be open sourcing a fair amount of their stuff and their tools like TopLink Essentials are actually included in Glassfish as the reference implementation for JPA in Java EE 5.  In addition, JDeveloper really is totally free (not open source for the time being) and supports JavaEE 5 in the upcoming release of 11g. Be sure to check out all their free offerings in the sponsorship at the top of this report.  

Finally, we have CodeGear from Borland. Many of you probably remember the JBuilder of old and CodeGear's JBuilder 2007 is the next generation. Based on Eclipse and most likely priced lower than you've ever seen it before, JBuilder 2007 is apparently all about team collaboration. One example their team gave was what happens when a new project is created in the IDE. Basically, the project manager sets up all the settings and options in the project and then the IDE emails the project file to all your team members. Then, anytime there's a chance to the project, your team members automatically get the updates - keeping everyone in sync. In addition, the Enterprise edition also has many things to keep issue tracking and todo's and project management in sync whenever your online. When you're offline, you can have the option to bring it all local and sync up when you come back online. I haven't had the chance to try it out, but if you're a JBuilder fan (and there are quite a lot of you) then this is probably a must have upgrade.

In addition to these guys, there were many other companies with cool and useful things to talk about.  During our next regularly scheduled newsletter, I hope to touch on some of the other things I saw on the pavilion.  It was certainly one of the most active pavilions I've seen in a while and I hope that was a good thing for everyone who chose to have a booth there this year.

Until Next Time,
Matthew Schmidt
matt@javalobby.org
Yahoo IM: mattschmidtjl