Online coverage from the Sun Developer Network staff 2008 JavaOne Conference

by Ed Ort, Sun Microsystems Staff Writer

Last year saw the birth of CommunityOne a free, full-day event that preceded the 2007 JavaOne Conference and set the tone for what would be a full week of presentations, demonstrations, and knowledge sharing by and for the open-source community. Celebrating its second appearance, this year's CommunityOne was even bigger and better than last year's version.

The event, sponsored by Sun, brought together a large and diverse gathering of many of the leading-edge open-source communities such as the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse, Grails, NetBeans, ODF Alliance, OpenSUSE, OpenID, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Python, Ruby, Ubuntu, and others. This was more than triple the number of communities attending last year's CommunityOne event. "Large and diverse" also characterized the agenda. CommunityOne offered over 70 technical sessions in 12 tracks ranging from Chip Multithreading/OpenSPARC to Web and Application Servers -- all highlighting the challenges and successes of community-based, open-source projects. Running parallel to the 12 tracks were a RedMonk unconference that offered sessions conceived of and run in an open, participatory, community-driven style (these are also called barcamps in hacker-speak), and another unconference called StartUp Camp that focused on getting entrepreneurs in startups to share ideas. As many as 500 entrepreneurs participated. Over 3000 people attended the CommunityOne event, including students from 80 countries.

Keynote: Innovate, Collaborate, Integrate

Ian Murdock

Sun's vice president of developer and community marketing, Ian Murdock, started the day with a keynote session that set the theme for the day: Innovate, Collaborate, and Integrate. Clearly, the community, or rather communities, have reshaped the computer industry and will continue to do so in new and innovative ways. To underscore the power of collaboration, Sun CEO and president Jonathan Schwartz, in a brief appearance onstage, asked the audience to think of the Amazon River. "You can look at the Amazon as this enormous powerful force of nature, but in truth it's not one river. It's the composition of 10,000 smaller rivers, each of them lending their own capacity, volume, and force of energy to something much bigger."

But collaboration, especially if it involves many contributors, does have its downside. Customers want to tap into the power of the community, but don't want to deal with the complexity of technology that comes from multiple sources. This has spurred the rise of aggregators and integrators such as Dell and Red Hat. Murdock said these companies provide a valuable role, "They deliver the complex but powerful world of community technology to the market in the form that the market can digest." But this service to customers presents a challenge to contributors, Murdock framed the challenge as a series of questions. "What's the role of the small independent developer in this world? Are we going back to monolithic structure in the pursuit of simplicity? What's the right balance between integration and choice and flexibility?"

Murdock made the point that open source and the communities behind it are the core of Sun's business today. He said that Sun is attempting to strike the right balance. On the one hand, Sun is committed to fostering the community model and open-source software. On the other, it's focused on developing modular architectures, where developers can contribute to core platforms with edge technologies -- whether these technologies are packages, plug-ins, extensions, or adapters. This bilateral approach can benefit the core platform as well as the independent developer.

Panel Discussion: A Multitude of Models, How Communities Work

Open Source Panel

An engrossing sidelight to Murdock's keynote was a panel discussion titled "A Multitude of Models, How Communities Work." Led by Matt Asay, general manager and vice president of Alfresco and a prolific blogger on open source topics, the panel included community luminaries such as Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation; Mike Evans, vice president of community development at Red Hat; Jeremy Allison, the Samba project lead at Google; Marten Mickos, Sun senior vice president for databases and former CEO of MySQL; Ted Leung, Sun Microsystems principal engineer and Python project lead; and Stormy Peters, OpenLogic's director of community and partner programs. The panel discussed a wide range of questions such as "Who makes up various communities such as MySQL?" and "Is there a tension between satisfying the needs of code contributors and satisfying the needs of a business?" The speakers encouraged audience members to participate in the discussion by posting questions through the social blogging tool Twitter. This led to some interesting technical questions -- but also to a humorous one: "Did Jeremy [Allison] dress like Steve Jobs on purpose? "

OpenSolaris Launch

Rich Green Announces the Release of OpenSolaris

Perhaps the biggest announcement of the day came from Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president for software, in his talk titled "Be Brilliant Faster." Green announced the fully supported release of the OpenSolaris operating system. Created through worldwide community collaboration, the OpenSolaris OS is an example of what the open-source model can accomplish. The leading-edge operating system allows users to fully install and customize their open-source OS deployment quickly and easily. To demonstrate this, Sun Distinguished Engineer Stephen Hahn showed how easy and fast it is to fully install OpenSolaris from a LiveCD distro. The operating system installed in less than 15 minutes.

Some other cool demos ensued, and the highlight was a dramatic demonstration of the ZFS data recovery feature. Armed with a sledgehammer and a drill, Sun Fellow and Solaris Chief Technologist Jim Hughes and his partner in destruction, Sun distinguished engineer and chief architect of ZFS Jeff Bonwick, did fatal damage to two hard drives that were connected to a processor. Green quipped this was true "hard drive compression." Hughes and Bonwick then used ZFS to quickly recover the data from a backup onto a new pair of drives.

Jim Hughes Hammers Away

Download the OpenSolaris OS for free from the OpenSolaris web site.

Technical Sessions and More

It was impossible to go to all of the sessions during this event, and it's very difficult to relate everything I saw and heard at the sessions I attended, but here's a sampling of what I experienced at three sessions at CommunityOne:

• The NetBeans IDE: Welcome, New, and Cool. During this session, which kicked off the NetBeans track, NetBeans evangelists at Sun Brian Leonard, Bruno Souza, Gregg Sporar, and Roman Strobl demonstrated some of the cool new features in NetBeans 6.1 such as support for JavaScript and the Groovy language. Believe me, NetBeans 6.1 is loaded with cool features. In addition to its JavaScript support, NetBeans 6.1 supports the Spring web framework, is more tightly integrated with MySQL, and starts up a lot faster (up to 40%) than it used to. Try it out.
• jMaki: The Power of Ajax Made Easy. In this session, the two principal contributors to the jMaki project, Sun engineer Carla Mott and Sun Ajax architect Greg Murray, demonstrated the latest features in jMaki, a lightweight framework for creating Ajax-enabled applications. Among its other features, the jMaki framework makes available widgets from popular JavaScript toolkits such as Dojo, Yahoo, Script.aculo.us, and Google in a way that's familiar to Java technology, PHP, or Phobos developers. One of the more interesting demonstrations during the session underscored just how easy it is to take advantage of the jMaki event mechanism so that an event on one widget can trigger an action on other widgets.
• JavaFX Script Programming Language and GlassFish Application Server V3: Productivity and Power, Front to Back. In this session, Sun software engineers Tim Quinn and Josh Mariucci showed off some of the neat features in the JavaFX Script language that simplify developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and how the open source GlassFish Applications Server v3 provides an ideal environment for deploying and running JavaFX Script applications. Aside from being feature rich itself, GlassFish Application Server V3 has modular packaging. The core module is extremely small and has a fast (one second or less) startup time.

The general sessions and many of the technical sessions were video recorded and will be available for replay on the CommunityOne web site.

As content-rich as these sessions are, going to an event such as CommunityOne is more than sitting in on talks. There's also the great value you get in meeting people, learning about their experiences and their work, and the infectiousness of their enthusiasm. Bringing vibrant, creative, enthusiastic, fun people together -- that's what CommunityOne is all about.