Sun Tech Days, Milan

This morning I sat in on a session officially titled "Sun Technical Demo," but known by those who participate in it as the "Demo Shootout." As Reggie Hutcherson, manager of the Sun Technology Evangelism Group, said in introduction, the session gives Sun's evangelists five minutes each to "wow you with our technologies." And wow us they did. What happened here was that five evangelists in Reggie's group each demonstarted a leading-edge Java technology. Ostensibly this was a competition to see who did the most eye-popping demonstration. But in actuality, all the demos were attention grabbing and fun. Of course, that was really the idea: demonstrate that Sun has a panoply of cool stuff available for developers.

Here's a brief rundown of what each of the evangelists demonstrated:

Arun Gupta: jMaki

jMaki is a open source framework that makes it easy to build Ajax-enabled applications. The framework wraps JavaScript widgets, such as those from popular JavaScript toolkit providers Dojo and Scriptaculous, so that the widgets can be used in a familiar way (you can also wrap your own widgets). For instance, if you're a Java developer used to working with JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology, you can access the wrapped widgets in JSP tags, if you're a Ruby developer, you can access them in a Ruby programming style. Even better, these wrapped widgets are tool-enabled so that you can easily drag and drop them into an application from a palette in NetBeans or Eclipse. And it's this latter capability that Arun took advantage of to show how easy it is to build a "Sun Tech Days Event Map," an application that combines a Google Map, a drop-down list of Tech Days events, and a calendar. These three items were included in the application as jMaki widgets, and the resulting application is a mashup that ties all these things neatly together. Arun showed how clicking on an event in the drop-down list, highlights an entry in the calendar, and changes the map to show that event's location. Clearly there's a publish/subscribe mechanism at work in jMaki such that when a user clicks on one widget it notifies the other widgets, and passes them appropriate data.

You can view a screencast that shows Arun building the Sun Tech Days Event Map application.

Sang Shin: NetBeans Profiler

NetBeans has added a lot of new and exciting capabilities in version 6. One significant addition is the NetBeans Profiler. Sang Shin pointed out that using the new Profiler, you can find the bottlenecks in your applications or the source of memory leaks. He demonstrated this by purposely adding a problematic line of code to a Java application, a line guaranteed to cause a memory leak. After running the application, he ran the Profiler and showed how quickly it can zero in on poorly-designed lines of code. The Profiler opens a browser that displays tables of data about a running application. Sang singled out one column, the generation column, as being particularly valuable is identifying the source of memory leaks. In his demo he was able to use generation data to find the problematic line in his application very quickly.

Phillip Torchinsky: D-Light

Continuing with the theme of application analysis, Phillip Torchinsky demonstrated the D-Light set of analysis instruments in Sun Studio Express. D-Light is based on Dtrace, a sophisticated tracing system in the Solaris Operating System. As Sun Studio Program Manager, Kuldip Oberoi, states in his blog entry on D-Light, "Project D-Light introduces a a simple drag 'n drop interface that interactively displays how your application is performing." Torchinsky demonstrated this by dragging and dropping two of the instruments that D-Light provides: a clock profiler and a Java Object Creation Monitor. Running these instruments displays various types of information about the behavior of an application, such as the call stack and the number of bytes transmitted in each I/O operation. Torchinsky honed in on one read operation that read in 0 bytes of data, something that suggests further analysis.

You can watch a video that demonstrates D-Light.

Sridhar Reddy: Sun Spots and Track Bots

Earlier this year, I blogged about a demonstration of Sun SPOT technology. Small Programmable Object Technology, or SPOT for short, is a cool technology that involves a small, battery-operated wireless device that can be programmed in Java, in other words, it has a Java Virtual Machine inside of it. The previous blog covered some demonstrations of Sun SPOT technology given by Sun evangelist Simon Ritter, one of which showed how a Sun SPOT device could be used to direct the movements of a robotic toy truck or "bot."

Sridhar did two demos that involved Sun SPOT devices and bots. In the first demo he showed a pre-programmed Sun SPOT mounted on a bot. The Sun SPOT device commanded the bot to travel in a circle. In the second demo, Sridhar used NetBeans and Java ME to program a Sun SPOT that he held in his hand. By moving the Sun SPOT device and changing it's orientation, Sridhar could remotely command the bot to move in various directions.

You can find out more about Sun SPOT technology.

Inyoung Cho: Mobile IRIS

This was perhaps the most visually impressive demo. Here Inyoung Cho demonstrated a mobile phone-based version of the IRIS photo arrangement application. Built on Java ME technlogy, the mobile application allows a user to download photos from the Flickr photo sharing site to a mobile phone, select a photo, rearrange a set of photos, get detailed information about a photo -- even a map showing where the photo was taken, and upload photos to Flickr.

Cho's demo showed a very nice mobile phone emulator that not only displays photos, but can also display running videos. Cho created a photo by capturing a frame from a video and then uploaded the photo to Flickr.

Who Won?

All interesting demos, all interesting technologies. But if this was a competition, I'd choose the Sun Spots and Bots demo as the winner. I just liked the way Sridhar got down on the floor with his SPOT and bot. Reminds me of bygone days when I'd get down on the floor with the kids and play with their matchbox cars. Fun indeed!