Continuing my JavaOne 2007 series with the overview of the few things which excited me this year.

Robots Everywhere!

My 10-year-old son is a robot geek and our living room is filled with robots of all shapes and sizes programmed to do different tasks. At this JavaOne I felt like a 10 year old surrounded by different kinds of robots. Java-powered robotics is big at JavaOne this year and I just could not resist looking around.

The robosapien-based RM Media robot from WowWee Robotics is a really impressive toy. It has a Java ME VM and APIs and can be progammed to do different talks like follow an orange ball. One problem of Java ME platform is the lack of a profile for unconnected devices with limited user input (no phone-style keypad). Robots like this one or MP3 players would benefit from an "unconnected MIDP" profile allowing to play existing games on the LCD screen and write and share new applications.

Simon Ritter and Angela Caicedo showed what the Sun SPOT platform can do by building a virtual reality game application (TS-1780). SunSPOT runs on a 180 MHz 32-bit ARM CPU and supports a CLDC 1.1 VM called Squawk. With hardware and software interfaces to a wide range of sensors, it is a perfect robotics platform.

Autonomous robot navigation have made huge progress the last couple of years. Last JavaOne Paul Perrone showed Tommy, the Java-powered dune buggy he built for the DARPA Grand Challenge. This year he built an autonomous helicopter and is preparing for the DARPA Urban Challenge with his new robotics creation. Both use Java Real-Time System on Solaris 10 at the core of their navigation application (TS-1519).

SONIA is an autonomous underwater explorer developed by the university students in Montreal (TS-1990). Not only did they need to solve the underwater navigation problem, but also keep water from damaging the Java SE-powered brain.

Greg Bollella showed an industrial robot arm built on Java Real-Time System running on standard off-the-shelf Solaris box. Originally designed to hangle croissants at 10G, this is serious stuff, not a toy.

Code analysis tools

Static and dynamic code analysis tools are advancing. You can now find all sorts of hard-to-find bugs hiding in the code: memory leaks, uninitialized memory, dead code and unused variables.

Alex Kuzmin did a great overview of the today's code analysis tools, both static and dynamic (TS-5711). His talk attracted a lot of interest and had a long Q&A discusion at the end.

William Pugh (the author of the FindBugs tool) did an impressive talk based on his experience with static analysis (TS-2007).

Roman Shaposhnik, talking at an amazing pace, showed a demo of the project called D-Light at James Gosling's keynote. D-Light is a new dynamic performance analysis tool based on D-Trace. It is currently a SunStudio plug-in, but hopefully a NetBeans version will be available soon.

3D

Paul Byrne showed the Wonderland project. It looks like a Java version of Second Life, but it was designed as a collaboration workspace. It re-uses some of the project Looking Glass ideas, but takes them to the next level. This project is currently a concept demo version, but will we one day come to work to a virtual office?

Erik Hellman from Sweden generated a lot of attention with his 3D-gaming session (TS-3073). Being neither a game developer, nor a 3D API expert, nor an artist, he put together a really simple Java first-person multi-player shooter game he called "Duke Bean'em" featuring Duke with guns shooting coffee beans. While the game itself wasn't particularly impressive, it is a good showcase of a range of open-source Java technologies which demonstrates that 3D gaming is easier than it is perceived to be.