Monday June 15, 2009

I'll be spending next week in Zurich at Jazoon'09. They've got a great lineup of technical sessions to pump your head full of all the latest everything. The lineup of speakers is pretty impressive.

PS. Several folks have asked why I disappeared from JavaOne so quickly after my Toy Show keynote: my youngest daughter's school was holding a talent show at noon, and I had to be there. Work is not at the top of life's priority list :-) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday June 08, 2009

This was another amazing JavaOne. It was also the weirdest: between the Oracle situation, the global meltdown, and the financial situation, it was very different. Early on, we were really concerned (==nearly paniced) that no one would show up. Almost every company that usually sends a crowd of people to JavaOne had travel restrictions that meant that few could attend. From what we had seen from other conferences, we feared the worst. And yet, attendance ended up being about 15,000. Very respectable!

The press, of course, was weird this year: we did few interviews, mostly because there was only one topic they wanted to ask about, and there was nothing we could say.

My favorite part of JavaOne this year was the standing ovation that Scott got on Monday. It was a remarkably emotional moment for everyone. To all of you who contributed to that thundering applause: Thanks!

Our lineup of new technologies was great: JDK7 is looking wonderful; JavaFX reached another release milestone and is maturing nicely, along with it's tools; glassfish V3 is becoming totally wonderful; NetBeans 6.7+kenai is a killer combination; and the store is on it's way to being an amazing addition.

The fun part, for me, is the Toy Show. It's not about strategic initiatives, business issues, corporate relations, or new releases. It's all about jaw-dropping surprise. Everything from the Mifos (MIcroFinance, Open Source) project: bringing millions out of poverty. To Manuel Tijerino's jukebox architected to give indie musicians broad exposure and a source of revenue independent of the studios. To teaching kids through BlueJ and robotics competitions. And saving lives by doing computationally intensive image matching in an EE server with a JavaFX front end to analyse cancer biopsies. And the total victory of technology and style over common sense that is Neil Young's LincVolt. And a whole lot more. Permalink Comments [4]

Monday June 01, 2009

JavaOne is finally beginning! Getting ready for this one has been an incredible amount of work for everyone involved. The lineup of sessions is superb. I had a *really* hard time picking the Duke's choice winners (they all deserved to win). The engineering teams have been doing grand acts of heroism to get a pile of software releases ready. The demos have come together beautifully. Some are a little too close to the bleeding edge, but that's what makes them fun. The big surprise for everyone is attendance: given what we had been hearing about attendance at other conferences, we braced for the worst.... But we've done rather nicely. I'm *so* looking forward to the Toy Show on Friday. There's some jaw-dropping stuff to see. Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday April 29, 2009

One of the many interesting things we've been working on lately is the Developer Cloud. There are two major components to it. One is the cloud infrastructure itself: Kenai a much-more-than-a-forge collection of developer facilities that allows you to assemble project areas from a selection of services that range from several SCM systems, bug management systems, wikis and forums. There's a lot more stuff in the pipeline for Kenai, but it's pretty impressive already. The other major component is the tool support that is showing up in NetBeans 6.7. The beta was just released. I've been running the "dailies" for quite a while now. It's real impressive: there's a lot more to NB 6.7 than the developer cloud, but the cloud support is the standout feature. We're just beginning, but it's already transformed the way I work.

If you're one of those neolithic vi users, clinging to the banging-together of rocks: Stop! Go to NetBeans now! Permalink Comments [3]

Tuesday April 28, 2009

Can't afford a JavaOne pass or travel expenses? We're running a contest to help get you there.

Permalink Comments [3]

Monday April 27, 2009

The mobile group has just released a lovely new version of what used to be called the "wireless toolkit", but is now the Java ME SDK. It includes integration with third-party emulators and Windows Mobile devices; on-device deployment and on-device debugging; CLDC/MIDP, CDC/FP/PBP/AGUI, and BD-J (blue-ray); the new CLDC HotSpot Virtual Machine; an optimized MSA 1.1 stack with extensions; profiling support; new development environment based on Netbeans; the Lightweight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) and device search database are integrated; and the JavaFX Mobile Emulator is now included.

It's a massive release of tasty new stuff for mobile and embedded developers. Enjoy! Permalink Comments [4]

Sunday April 19, 2009

I spent the end of last week in Atlanta at the finals for the FIRST Robotics Competition. This is a competition where high school students build robots that perform some task. This year's task looked an awful lot like building a robotic basketball player. I was there partly because it's just a cool event; but mostly because we were announcing (along with the folks from FIRST and from the Robotics lab at WPI) that beginning with next years event, students could do their programming in Java. The controller that all teams use is the Compact RIO from National Instruments. It's a nice enough unit, but the C programming environment is brutal: when bugs cause crashes, the most you'll get is a register dump with (maybe) a listing of the assembly code around the crash site. There's no protection between the OS and the application, so the whole OS goes down when the application crashes. This is a tough place for professionals to work, let alone high school students. As a consequence, the amount of programming that is done is pretty minimal. So the robots are mostly mechanical engineering, with very little robotic ability to operate autonomously. We were demoing the new Java environment where NetBeans could be used to remotely (over the wireless link) debug Java programs live inside the robot: stack traces, breakpoints, looking at variables, ... all the cool NetBeans deployment and debugging tools totally transform the development experience. Permalink Comments [8]

Monday April 13, 2009

The Java crew at Sun is once again totally into getting ready for this year's JavaOne conference. The papers submitted were awesome: they'll make for a great lineup of technical sessions. EE6 will be a major feature of the enterprise track, as will RESTful techniques. Swing and JavaFX will be all over the place. The device world continues to get more interesting: among many other cool devices, the LincVolt will be there.

I know the economy is a mess, and it feels like the world is melting down, but JavaOne is a great opportunity to get your head out of all of that and take a geek's vacation. Come join us! Permalink Comments [5]

Sunday April 05, 2009

If you're anywhere near St Petersburg (the one with the palaces, not the one with dolpins) come to the TechDays event we're running next week. My boss (Jeet Kaul - pronounced "Cool", and he is) will be there, along with a pile of experts on a wide variety of topics from all Sun technologies. Three intense days of technology deep dives. Always fun and educational! Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday March 24, 2009

I spent last week wandering the UK. Mostly in London, but I spent a great day at a developer conference for GCHQ where I gave a keynote and was on a panel about agile development. It was a pretty spirited group and a lot of fun.

In London I gave talks at a pile of companies: mostly financial institutions, all heavy Java users. I'm always amazed at the cool things bankers do: not at all like the stodgy stereotype at all. They seemed really happy to get into geekish deep dives, if only to distract themselves from everything else that's going on. I ended the trip at a developer event at the Royal Geographic Society.

One thing I kept getting asked about was using real-time for transaction servers. The reason they're all interested is because the real-time VM has a garbage collector that has guaranteed maximum pause times. While this does work very well, it is often overkill. One of the cool new pieces of technology on the Java landscape is the Garbage First (G1) collector. It was presented at the last JavaOne, but not available then. For details, you should read the excellent paper on it. Continuing our recent habit of sliding major functionality into update releases, G1 is going to be in JDK6 update 14, which is currently in beta and available through the early-access program. If you have issues with large heaps, multicore, or pause times, give it a try. We'd love to hear your testing feedback. Permalink Comments [9]

Wednesday February 18, 2009

It's the end of day 1 of Tech Days in Hyderabad. What a great crowd! The locals were apologizing that "only" 6000 developers were there: the conference center is only big enough to accommodate 6000 attendees, and it's the largest conference center in India. The place is just jammed. There are about 800,000 professional Java developers in India, and we just don't have room for them all. Yesterday morning I did some tourist exploring and ran into a bunch of them at a local temple: took a pile of photos and had some nice conversations. The really hard problem for me with conferences like this is that it would be lovely to shake hands and talk to everyone. But there aren't enough hours in a day. It's nice to have a break from the incessant pessimism of the global economic meltdown. Permalink Comments [10]

Sunday February 15, 2009

I'll be spending this week at Tech Days in Hyderabad. It'll be a grand geekfest with lots of educational sessions. If you're anywhere near by, come join in. It promises to be a lot of fun.

The big thrill last week was the launch of JavaFX mobile, which is included in JavaFX 1.1, which was also launched last week. Besides officially supporting mobile platforms, JavaFX now has richer support of numeric types and a whole pile of performance improvements. JavaFX is getting really nice, really fast. Take it out for a spin.

If you happen to be going to Mobile World Congress this week (where it seems every mobile developer is going), there will be a pile of folks from Sun who would love to show you a bunch of cool JavaFX apps running on a wide variety of cellphones. Permalink Comments [4]

Thursday January 15, 2009

I apologize for not blogging much lately, but life has been seriously hectic. One tidbit has broken me out of my manic frenzy: The NetBeans crew ended up with an impressive stack of awards from developer.com. They've totally changed the way I develop software. Permalink Comments [5]

Sunday December 21, 2008

This has certainly been a year that no one will forget. Between wars, global economic meltdown and an amazing election in America, all the stuff that goes on in the computer industry pales to insignificance - although the stuff we all build had a role to play. The internet has certainly changed the process of elections forever.

Nonetheless, it's been a great year in the Java universe: JavaFX 1.0 launched; NetBeans 6.5; Glassfish V3; JDK6u10/11; MSA; OpenJDK&jdk7... OpenSolaris 2008.11, OpenStorage, OpenSSO, VirtualBox, OpenOffice 3, MySQL 5.1... Software at Sun has really been cranking out great stuff. Permalink Comments [5]

Friday December 19, 2008

Between family and job I end up always being pretty busy. I like playing video games, but getting a block of time long enough to put into any of the Big Games is pretty much impossible. So I'm always looking for games that you can play quickly and get a thrill-buzz in just a few minutes. After about a billion rounds, the attraction of Solitaire has worn pretty thin. Lately I've been playing Titan Attacks from the folks at PuppyGames. It's got a great kickback-in-a-bar-with-a-beer arcade feel to it. Thanks Cas!

PS. If you try it out, and you like it, consider paying for it: that'll help more great new games happen. Permalink Comments [4]