JavaOne 2008
I meant to follow up on my previous post
on CommunityOne with a writeup on JavaOne right away. After all,
JavaOne immediately followed CommunityOne in the calendar. In any case,
here are my (long overdue) impressions on JavaOne.
The opening keynote (on Tuesday, May 6th) featured Rich Green. He
reiterated the focus of "Java+You" - where consumers are creating and
consuming content through both wired and mobile devices. Java
technology enables developers to create a wide range of rich,
interactive applications. To this end, he invited Ian Freed, VP of
Kindle at Amazon, to demonstrate this wireless reading
device. Either the demo gods were not kind to Ian or Rich
Green was not patient enough - his live demo of downloading a book on
the device did not work! The highlight of the keynote was an appearance
by Rock and Roll legend, Neil Young.
He described his life-long desire to produce media that would allow him
to share an interactive experience with his fans - complete with music,
videos, photos and the web. He failed at every attempt because of the
shortcomings of the solutions. Finally, the combination of Blu-ray and
Java technologies allowed him to create a 10-disc collection that
covers his first 10 years!
Bob
Brewin's keynote captured the latest advancements in Java EE,
Java SE and Java FX. Roberto Chinnici
led the discussion on Java EE. He rehashed Java
EE 5 platformbefore
turning his attention to Java EE 6
- which features support for RESTful web services and more extensive
use of annotations across all web APIs. Java EE 6 will add
extensibility points - making it easier to treat scripting languages,
such as Ruby, as first-class citizens. Danny Coward
next talked about Java SE 6 and the upcoming Java SE 7 - which will
support scripting languages like JavaScript, jRuby, JavaFX Script.
Finally, there were some cool JavaFX demos. The BeJUG
folks showed Parleys.com.
This is a web-based RIA that is an interactive learning platform.
Jeet
Kaul delivered the final keynote of the opening day. The
theme for this session was, "Java Wherever You Are" - of
applications that use Java ME to exploit constant connectivity. This was
illustrated in the demos featured in the session. Loopt
lets you find your friends on the map and see what they are up to.
There was a demo of the Light-Weight User Interface Toolkit, LWUIT. This
enables desktop-like UI capabilities on mobile devices. Finally,
Christopher David of Sony Ericsson talked about MSA
- an umbrella standard that facilitates
the development and deployment of a wide variety
of applications, in a form that will be easily portable across a
broad spectrum of mobile devices. In earlier blog posts, I have
been hinting on the project that I am working on for the last year. We
had submitted an abstract for JavaOne back in November '07 - thinking
that our product will be released by JavaOne and that we can talk about
it. Due to a variety of reasons, the product is still not released.
On Wednesday, May 7th, Todd Fasttalked
about the concept
and it was received very well. The following are some of the blog
entries on Todd's talk that have been published since then:
On the final day of JavaOne (Friday, May 9th), James
Gosling
gave the keynote. He calls it the "Java toy show" - where he invites
the biggest and the best to demo their Java programs/devices on the big
stage. Many of these are Duke's Choice
award winners. The demo that drew that loudest applause was the Pulse
smartpen - where the pen becomes a compute platform. The pen
records audio and links the audio to what you write. I was among those
who stood in line to purchase one immediately afterwards!
Tuesday May 27, 2008
