Wow...really!
The sheep-effect, fond New Zealanders can explain this to you over a beer one day, of the droves of people wading into the keynote this morning. Not to mention the queue of eager people winding its way down Howard St and through to 5th St waiting to get into the keynote from the doors of the Moscone Center:
First off, there's nothing like jumping straight into it and putting some code up on a screen first thing in the morning, a demo of Creator was shown that truly did make it all look easy:
For a quick catchup for most of us ( as I discovered with a quick conversation of lunch, the current status of Sun's product set is lost on most people )
- Java Studio was something ahead of its time in Java gui-driven component building that Sun did about 6 or so years ago
- Java Workshop was something else we did for a little while for a Java IDE
- Forte for Java was the most recent link with the current genre of Sun Java IDE's
- NetBeans is the open source IDE that is a close cousin of the demo's shown today with Java Studio
- Creator is the "corporate developer" version of IDE that is shown above
- Java Studio Enterprise is the "for sale" version of NetBeans with many enhancements, including those shown below
Next a quick switch to cram in the UML features of Java Studio Enterprise such as UML 2.0 class diagrams that can forward engineer code skeletons, which can have code entered then reflect those changes in the UML class diagrams - aka round-trip engineering:
Next we had the inimicable Todd Fast demonstrate the new collaboration features which combine traditional concepts of team code collaboration with locking of code segments that team members may be working on, as well as the instant messaging functionality that allows for greater communcation on top of the code collaboration - well recieved by everyone i spoke to. Todd also demonstrated the editor features such as look-and-feel and autocomplete within the chat window, which raised a muffled murmur of interest in the crowd.
The folks at PsiNetics brought in a demo of Jini and Bluetooth which was interesting to see. I believe they were Canadian, they might have mentioned it somewhere :)
The next highlight can only be described as the closest thing to the Gates Borg picture in real life that i have ever seen. The contraption used linux with Java2D and the FreeTTS engine for speech recognition, web camera, thumb mouse pointer, and a laptop strapped around the waist, with keyboard strapped to the arm - there was some reference to "making it smaller" which i won't elaborate on, purely because the inference had nothing to do with the technology - go figure:
Too close for Comfort?
The one that really topped it all off had to be the real-time Java ( or RTJava ) project which was working on 5 ms intervals with no visible signs of interruption by any garbage collection that was going on ( including running Java2D applets to unnecessarily chew up CPU cycles ). On top of all that, the solution was built on top of fault-tolerent systems which already exist ( from memory, the likes of the old Sun Netra t line of NEBS level 3 compliant servers ). Two servers had a heartbeat private network link for failover ( similar to cluster setups ) with one network link to the heart of the real-time controller. The demo itself was a reverse pendulum which was rather plain looking, to be honest at first, but when the system was fired up and the ruler that was hanging downward was swung back and forth until it became upright and the system was able to balance the rod even if James pushed it to one side - which he seemed to enjoy many times over, it compensated for the imbalance and corrected itself in real-time. Last but not least, a demonstration of failover with a countdown, 5-4-3-2-1 and then the power plug was pulled from one of the servers and James pushed that poor defenseless machine once again - and everything was still working as before ( hopefully this translates better as a video/webcast - worth the look ):
As for the panel discussion, i thought it was well balanced with both sides of the argument getting reasonable attention. After at least two requests by the panel for IBM's Rod Smith ( owner of the open letter ) to explain why he believe Sun should Open Source Java, I don't believe I heard an answer. The discussion centred on compatibility and innovation, and what i heard from the open source advocates was that Open Source'ing invariably means derivatives of the specification, but there is a lot of innovation. The response from the MLB side of the panel was that there is a lot of innovation in Java, witnessed by the content of the conference itself, and Sun has been a good Angel/Guardian of Java to maintain the compatibility - and why risk changing what's currently working ( to much applause )
Discussions on the JCP could be summarised with a quote by Gosling from Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried "( http://www.quotecha.com/quotes/quotation_16578.html )
Other favourite quotes:
- Rob Gingell: "Who can't love a penguin?"
- James Gosling: "I think SCO is causing more humour than problems"
- James Gosling: "Linux is re-living the old Unix wars"
I think Tim O'Reilly summed the discussion best with my paraphrased version: "It seems that the Open Source requests are coming from two camps: the open source community who believe that Java is a natural fit and would benefit the momentum of the open source initiative; then there is the java community itself in the vendors who are looking for a better seat at the table"
You can't go past a big finish, and the old t-shirt cannon contest's third finalist was "The Caffeinator", a giant crossbow complete with Java coat of arms:
James may be inspired to look into medieval SIG's after trying out the cross-bow a few times. So between, the nitrogen cannon, the tandem bike and the crossbow - the close decision by the Applause-O-Meter was the tandem bike - a sympathy vote for the broken chain surely.
