The following are my writeups on all the JavaOne keynotes I could attend. In case you’re looking for my blog on the CommunityOne keynote, it’s over here. I missed the IBM General Session and Microsoft General session on June 4th as I was out in San Francisco, but I guess I had no interest in attending those anyway. There’s one keynote I wish I hadn’t missed – the Sun Technical General Session called “Intelligent Design: The Pervasive Java Platform” on Tuesday afternoon, but I enjoyed watching the replay webcast online. The major news coming out of the Sony Ericsson General Session was about their new “Application Shop” and the bigger part of that news is that unlike “other app stores” out there, Sony’s developer program will be completely free! The model is that the once the application is purchased by a user, the revenue is split 70-30 between the developer and Sony (yep, that’s the catch).Note that I use the terms “general session” and keynote interchangeably.

Here’s a list of links to all the general session replay webcasts:

• Sun - Java: Change (Y)our World [JavaOne Keynote]
• Sun - Intelligent Design: the Pervasive Java Platform
• Sony Ericsson - Being Unique with Sony Ericsson
• Sun - Your Java Lifestyle: Mobile, TV, and Beyond [Sun Mobility Keynote]
• Microsoft - Software + Services: the Next Application Platform
• IBM - Extreme Transaction Processing and Elasticity – the Answer for Your Most Demanding Applications
• Sun - James Gosling's Toy Show

The JavaOne Keynote (June 2nd)

There was a lot of anticipation, excitement and suspense before the JavaOne keynote. As Scott McNealy rightly said, there was an elephant in the room.

I got into the keynote 10 minutes late and the moment I entered I saw Jonathan Schwartz presenting on stage, and was I happy to see him. It was everyone’s speculation that he might not come up this year to JavaOne at all due to the recent changes in the company, but I’m glad they were all proved wrong. I felt very satisfied and happy to see him being the first to present at the JavaOne keynote. He has led Sun through rough seas and has completely redefined the company and he deserves to lead it going forward too. He talked about how Java has evolved from a simple virtual machine meant to isolate the hardware from a progam’s runtime to highly scalable systems powered by Java EE and the resource limited Java Me running on billions of mobile devices. He took us down memory lane and talked about Java’s success and rapid growth throughout the years.

Sony’s new java-enabled blueray players will now feature a high level of interactivity and peer to peer connectivity across set top boxes. Now thats what I call impressive. Next up was the Chicago Boards Options Exchange, who happen to be running completely on Java. Sun & Intel's hardware and software optimization helps CBOE reach 300,000 transactions/sec. We finally saw JavaFX on TV. Loved the demo. JavaFX was finally truly on all screens of your life (fully baked!). Then we had Nandini Ramani, Director of JavaFX up on the stage demoing the much awaited JavaFX Designer! I think that’s the coolest thing they’ve done for JavaFX’s adoption… now any artist who does not coding at all can easily develop rich, compelling, cross-platform and cross-device user interfaces. The best thing is that it can be loaded from within a browser window wherever you are! Talk about versatility! I was in all complete awe to see James Gosling for the first time in person, on stage when he came up. He talked about the launch of the next big thing for Java developers wanting to make some money from their hard work – the Java Store. I like the fact that many companies are adopting the store model started and executed successfully Apple. It’s ok to copy a concept, as long as you adapt it well to the problem domain you target. The Java Store will be a big hit. The only thing which matters then is the money model for the store, which I hope Sun dwells out nicely. Runescape is pretty slick. 150 million users isn’t a joke, specially for a game developed in Java! They deserved the Duke’s choice award. They seem to be a little overconfident about getting it to run so easily on JavaFX TV, but let’s see. Soon I found myself looking at 2 demigods and 1 god on-stage: Jonathan Schwartz, Scott McNealy and James Gosling. It couldn’t get any better.

I was glad to see Scott McNealy taking the stage to reassure the Java community about Java’s positive future and the healthy growth. As funny as Scott always is, he talked a bit about the possibilities that had opened up for Sun after being acquired by Oracle Corp including but not limited to “free advertising” – Java logo’s on sails boats, then he showed a slide with Larry shaking hands with Steve Jobs inside an iPhone – now that really excited.. really if that could happen, it would be the best thing ever for so many iPhone users (especially those like me who would get best of both worlds on the same device one and for all!). And Oh Yes – he speculated that now JavaOne could be conducted in Japan as well. We were all shocked to see him calling up Larry Ellison on stage. It was very reassuring to hear Larry speak positive things about Java’s future including 2 words that I cannot ever forget : “expanded investment” :). He plans to use JavaFX for the user interface to OpenOffice. He said JavaOne will definitely continue to happen in the years to come (yay!).

Scott made us all emotional in the end first taking the opportunity to thank all the Java developers and the Java community at large for all their contributions and then telling us that this is the last year that he’ll be the president of JavaOne. Everyone stood up in ovation for him when got off the stage, the crowd was cheering and applauding him as he settled down. Touchy moment there.

The wifi at the Moscone center was severely down during the keynote session and then lightly broken throughout the day as there were probably thousands of tweeters buzzing about the  announcements made and then the goings-on of the first day of the conference. The funniest thing was that I did tweet during the keynote via my GPRS connection but my tweets still did not appear. Some problem with the Twitterific app on the iPhone. I then had to retweet everything in the afternoon.

We were all anticipating Larry Ellison to be present at the JavaOne keynote, and present he was. His presence, along with Scott’s confidence in Oracle reassured our faith in Java and put our worried minds to rest for a while.

Sun Mobility Keynote (June 3rd)

I was really looking forward to this session. This is one session which would demonstrate the ultimate versatility and pervasiveness of the Java platform and its empowerment across all devices defining your digital lifestyle. I got myself a seat right upfront in the 3rd row, all ready to be blown away by the cool demos. Eric Klein took the stage. He tells us that he’s a virgin at giving keynotes as it is his first time. It’s ok Eric, we all have our first times. He called up James and Chris to help him with some T-Shirt mobility ;). 3 lucky guys caught those special edition T-shirts. And they were special not because they were special, but because the catches won themselves the first JavaFX mobile phone by HTC. One of them was a campus ambassador, sitting just 3 rows behind me, shooting past by me. Here’s a video of how that happened.

I thought I heard Eric giving a hint that JavaFX would soon run on the iPhone? Maybe that was just me. We soon had some tweet love on the stage with a live demo of a twitter app running on JavaFX mobile phone. Paypal showed off its mobile app, allowing one to pay a friend on the go using their JavaFX mobile app. Way cool! Now I’ll just wish the people I owe money to don’t get hands on these ever! Anyway I’m glad Paypal got 2.6 billion new users thanks to Sun, the JavaFX Mobile team, and ofcourse that 1 developer who made the app in a week’s time! They then further make us envy with their one letter domain name – X.com, their new developer platform website.

Eric unveils the much awaited major release of JavaFX mobile as well its developer environment, along with the world’s first JavaFX enabled phone and a book I’m soon going to review, called “Essential JavaFX”

The JavaFX content authoring tool was already amazing and it just got better with the ability to develop for JavaFX Mobile as well! Open it up in a browser, connect your phone via USB, write your app and deploy! Select target device screen and everything adjusts automatically! Lots of other cool features like drag and drop binding. You just have to see this in action in the keynote replay!

Next up was Qualcomm with their new concept of Smartbooks – something between a laptop and a smartphone. It’s a netbook with 3G connectivity, built-in GPS receiver, always-on internet connectivity and a long battery life to keep it running for long as 24 hours. Now that is something I’d like to keep in my bag of gadgets too! Eric then shows off a Sun cloud connected media center app called the ClouDVR. And ofcourse, he ran it on the desktop, mobile and.. Yes JavaFx TV!

Klein also called on stage, folks from Orange to celebrate their 5th birthday and talk about JATAF and another initiative of Orange. He ended the inspiring and exciting keynote talking about the Java Store, coining the phrase “Submit once, sell anywhere”.

James Gosling’s Toy Show (June 5th)

This particular session is one that everyone waits for, for the duration of the entire conference. Many people come to JavaOne only to see this session. It is the prime attraction of JavaOne for genuine Java enthusiasts (not for the business minded, they’d prefer the keynotes instead). This is the session for geeks, by the biggest geek. Every year James picks up the best work done in Java and brings all of those folks together to give cool demos at his awe-inspiring, mind-blowing and enigmatic toy show. I wouldn’t miss this for anything. James started the show talking about how late have got this year with him having to meet people even at 3 am :). He then starts calling up the Duke’s Choice award winners on stage. He calls up Terracotta first and lauds their brilliant work, mentioning that they probably know more java internals than anyone else on the planet! We then had Atlassian.

You gotta love them for all good open source projects they’ve been contributing in the past week. Talks about clover, their continuous integration cum testing system. Then we had something new. James called upon stage, the folks from the BlueJ project just to recognize their work and to wish them their 10th birthday. Runescape is much more than just the game. It’s a complete server infrastructure powered by Java serving 175 million accounts, managed by a team of just 6-7 people and a server which hasnt been rebooted since years. It’s a complete free and open source production workflow. It’s an ecosystem of tools and technologies. All that on java. All that completely free to play! Simply amazing!

This was just the beginning and there were ofcourse a whole bunch of other breathtaking demos. Sun people were on stage for a cool magical demo showcasing the 4th screen javafx can be projected on, a Wii-powered vision-based human computer interface which uses JavaFX for all the awesomeness. It’s similar to what the NUIGroup is doing (although not multi-touch). Tor Norbye, the "demo stud" is then called on stage to show off the cool JavaFX visual binding across all screens of your life! Love the master-slave strategy! FX authoring tool is smart

The coolest duke’s choice award winner IMHO was the Java Jukebox guy. This guy was not a developer, he was a musician. And he had went ahead and made a complete jukebox for wannabe bands to be able to upload their music and be heard at bars. What’s so great in that? Well, the stunning part is that It’s user interface is completely written in JavaFX and.. it runs on Solaris! with a touch screen! Unbelievable, but true! :)

Now: Your SIM card gets as smart as your phone! WiFi enabled Java Card 3.x based SIM card coming soon! SIM cards now have a life of their own thanks to Java! PlaySIM uses a Sun SPOT to power a SIM card with Java programmability and interface to things like GPS! Way cool! Lunacy folks then called on stage. Gee, there's kids younger than me featured on the gosling toy show. Robots on stage get James from the back! He needs to be a lil more careful during these sessions :). Next we see the Squawk VM ported to a previously C-only microcontroller, allowing over-the-air java debugging of a robot! smart work! Then we have Sven Reimers on stage showing how they control and monitor satellites using the Netbeans platform!

Volkswagon, Stanford and Sun have worked together to create the world’s fastest automated car.. a race car that drives by itself, being able to go upto speeds of 160 kph. It’s an Audi TTS! It uses the Java Real Time System! There’s more.. the system is completely running on Solaris! Best story I’ve heard yet. It’s competing for the DARPA challenge, obviously. Stanford is working on the control algorithms for the car to follow the GPS points. Sun’s providing the Java RTS and Solaris goodness. The car isn’t ready yet so that hey to show a video. Neil young’s car wonder was demonstrated just off the stage and he was given a special dukey for making it to the toy show 4th time in a row and to be using Java in so many innovative ways. They’ve revved up a 1955 model 6000-pound, fully-finned, circa 1960 convertible automobile to turn into an energy-efficient vehicle.

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..