International Technologist

JavaOne - Day 2

Sony Ericsson had the opening keynote today. I have known Christopher David virtually since first joining Sun in 1995 and have a huge respect for him personally and professionally. Having said that it just pained me more to see this keynote. I still have NO idea what the message was that they were trying to get across. Discussing with other delegates I found out that I was not alone. In fact I could not find anyone willing to speculate on what they thought they might have been trying to say.

They evening keynote was from the Consumer and Embedded software engineering team at Sun responsible for all the sub desktop Java Platforms (Java ME, JavaCard, WTK, etc). This is always a MUST for any fans of geek gadgets. This year was no exception. The main focus was JavaFX Mobile and how this can deliver common applications, user experience and look and field across "all the screens of your life". JavaFX demos were shown running on laptops, various mobile phones and TVs. I have to say as a user of multiple connected gadgets to story was very appealing. Let's how it will reach us as consumers sometime soon. JavaOne has a long history of showing demos that are based on simulating people to think of the just about possible rather than what is reality today which then takes a period of time from 6 months to 4 years to fall into the hands of the average consumer.

One of the most interesting sessions that I attended today was by Ericsson Labs who have taken the MLPK20 code based on project wonderland and extended it to provide a Java Mobile client running on a mobile phone as well as a few other extensions. The mobile client was a 2D plan view of the 3D world and did rather have me asking - WHY? The only sensible answer I could find was - because we wanted to see if we could. Performance was acceptable but more interesting were some of the extensions that they had added for virtual and physical world integration such as the whiteboard integration. Project Wonderland is built on the Project Darkstar server which has been designed originally for enabling networked multi player games. For anyone not familiar with project wonderland it is development kit for building virtual worlds and for MLPK20 think Second Life comes to the enterprise. Personally I find this whole are of applying Web 2.0 consumer technology to the enterprise a fascinating emerging area offering almost unlimited scope for creative thinking.

One other thing struck me today. For a conference that is titled JavaOne there seemed to me more than 50% of the technical sessions discussing interesting but NOT Java technologies such as various scripting languages and cloud computing. Cloud is everywhere at this JavaOne. Different clouds, tools for clouds, deploying on clouds, designing for clouds, testing on clouds, etc.

Posted at 11:03PM Jun 03, 2009 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

JavaOne - Day One

I am not going to cover the content from todays key note. You can find the playback here. What was far more interesting for me was the general them and emotions surrounding the key note. As I mentioned in my JavaOne prologue I did not come here expecting a whole slew of future announcements from Sun and certainly the key note did not present any surprises from that perspective. The only exception being the announcement of the Java store. Sun has often been criticised but the business community and analysts for developing great technology in Java but failing to build a business model around it to monetize the technology. As if to prove the point the one thing still missing from the beta version of the Java store is the billing system!

Much of the general session was devoted to looking back over the history of JavaOne and great news James Gosling was back on stage with his catapult launching T-shirts into the audience. Something missing from last years event. Finally Scott McNealy came on stage to close out the session. He finally announced that he wanted to address "the big pink elephant in the room" and proceeded to introduce Larry Ellison. It was at this point that I finally realised that this would be the last JavaOne hosted by Sun Microsystems Inc. I was also at Sun world 1995 where Java was launched (often mistakenly called the first JavaOne - indeed this was repeated today multiple times by Scott, Jonathan and James). This means that I was at the first and last JavaOne! Scott struggled to get his last few sentences out before he left the stage with the emotion of knowing it was his last JavaOne. For those of us who have been a long time at Sun it was quite an emotional event.

So what did Larry have to say. Well it mainly boiled down to 3 things. Firstly he stated that AJAX was dead and the future was JavaFX. He also said that he wanted to see JavaFX on Android. Finally he said that he saw no reason to reduce the investment and commitment made by both companies today following the take over. He also pointed out that today with the exception of the database ALL of Oracles software is dependent on Java so it would be business suicide to not work to ensure that Java continues to excel.

One interesting aside was that throughout the whole of Scott's presentation he used the works merge, merger and merged - no mention of the word takeover. Larry was magnanimous enough not to correct him.

The most entertaining and interesting session that I attended today was a session entitled AJAX vs JavaFX delivered by two guys from Mozilla. It was from the perspective of a developer of RIAs. Apart from the fact that it seriously over ran (the AV guy eventually announce over the top of them that the session was over) it was very good. They looked at which was best from a number of perspectives and also debated the relative importance of being best in each category. Categories included performance, usability, tools and libraries, audio and video integration, image manipulation and deployment.

The most popular topic by far for the sessions is all around cloud computing. Apart from that it is RIAs and scripting.

Posted at 11:25PM Jun 02, 2009 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

CommunityOne

The two main topics of the key note were Cloud Computing and the new release of Open Solaris 2009.6 (the binary distribution)

The cloud computing session include little over and above what was presented at Community One East back in March. The general availability of the storage cloud is imminent and the general availability of the compute cloud is expected soon. No precise dates were given.

One interesting fact that was slipped into the Open Solaris announcement was that the 2009.6 release will double up as the preview release for the next major release of Enterprise Solaris (ie. the replacement for Solaris 10). To understand why this is interesting you need to understand the release processor for Enterprise Solaris. At the point where a major release of Enterprise Solaris is made a snap shot of the development source tree is made and maintained separately from the development source tree. New features and bug fixes are added to the development source tree and (where possible) back ported to Enterprise Solaris as update releases or patches. The key wprds in this sentence are "where possible". The longer the time elapsed from the source code fork the greater the divergence of the two source trees and the harder it becomes to back port new features. Eventually you reach the point where back porting certain new features becomes commercially non viable or technically impossible. This all happened with Solaris 10. The development code base (Nevada), which became the Open Solaris code base and the two have been diverging to the point were an increasing number of new Solaris features are only available in Open Solaris and not in Solaris 10 (such as CrossBow, xVM and some features of ZFS). A new major release of Enterprise Solaris would bring them back in line. It would also be a milestone as the first release of Enterprise Solaris based on Open Source. So todays announcement means that a new major release is in the pipeline. No announcements were made on when it would happen but my guess is in a window 6-12 months from now.

Looking at the features of the new Open Solaris release they went back over some of the pre-existing features that have been enhanced like dTrace, ZFS and Time Slider. In looking at ZFS they covered hybrid storage pools and how they have been leveraged in the Open Storage 7000 family of products. The major new feature is Project Crossbow providing a major step forward in network virtualisatiion and network QoS management. The final thing that was of personal interest was the launch of Source Juicer for Open Solaris. This is a system for community members to contribute packages to the new IPS package repository. Back in 1998 I tried to push this idea at Sun and received a major battering from the Solaris marketing team. It is good to see that common sense has now prevailed.

Posted at 10:00PM Jun 01, 2009 by Sean Harris in Open Source  |  Comments[0]

Javaone and Communityone 2009

Well somehow I managed to convince my boss for the second year running to approve the funds for attending Javaone and Communityone so I am writing this from the VS019 to SFO. I will try to post daily from the show my thought s and insights. I am not entirely sure what to expect this year and how the event will be impacted by the Oracle announcement. Certainly Oracle are conspicuous by their absence from any of the key notes and the list of sponsors. For the past number of years Oracle have been a sponsor of the event and had one of the keynotes. I suspect that this has more to do with the not wanting to anything to derail the SEC filing and other regulatory filings than any real conspiracy. For the same reason I think anyone arriving at the event expecting to get any new or amazing announcements other than what has been said already will leave the event disappointed but rest assured if there is anything I pick up I will relay it.

Looking at the agenda for Communityone I think that one of the major themes will be cloud computing both from Sun and others. There also seems to be plenty of buzz again this year at Communityone and Javaone for scripting of various flavours.

One final thought is that despite years of experience of Javaone I still managed to board the plane without having installed brand new padded insoles in my shoes. Last year I went through two sets in a week. I guess I will be straight to the drug store tomorrow morning.

Posted at 07:28AM May 31, 2009 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Maker Faire

Despite the fact that I am about to embark on 5 days of intensive geek time I seem to have spent the one day of I have off this week at yet another geek event. This time for geeky hobbies.

I had arranged to meet an old friend and his family who live in the valley for the day. Although see him reasonably frequently because he travels to europe on business I rarely get to see his family. He suggested that we meet at the Maker Faire in San Mateo. Although he sent me a link to the web site I did not get a chance to read it before I departed so I had no idea really what to expect. On the train ride done to Hillsdale across the aisle from me sat a father and his young son (nearly 6!) and it became clear that they were heading for the same event. The father proceeded to read to his son the agenda for the day and some of the attractions and it started to become clear that I was on route to yet another type of geekfest.

Seriously though it was a great day out with a huge and diverse range of different displays all based on the common theme of people making things and have passion about what they made. The scale model radio control battleships that fire ball bearings at each other and try to damage and ultimately try to sink each other was very entertaining and popular. The electronics and construction hall and the robot hall particularly appealed to me and the make and launch your own solid fuel rocket was a huge hit with the kids. The display of bonsi trees and demonstration fascinated my friends wife. The sections on sewing and embroidery were of little interest to any of our party but were still busy and the range of weird and wonderful vehicles dotted around the site and traveling around the site provided continual amusement and interest. We particularly liked the psychedelic trike towing a trailer draped with tie dyed cheese cloth which we nick named the Hippy Davidson. The one that amused me the most and disturbed me slightly were the group there who designed, build and rode around in motorised Cup Cakes. Picture below.

For anyone who lives in the area particularly those with children I think it makes a great day out and indeed I spent all day wishing that my kids were there to share it with me.

Posted at 06:20AM May 31, 2009 by Sean Harris in Personal  |  Comments[0]

Apple Macbook Air

For over 12 years now I have run either Solaris or Linux on my laptop but increasingly found being system administrator for my laptop was less and less rewarding and more of a chore. I have been looking at Macs for sometime as a possible alternative and then last year I saw the Macbook Air. I blame Simon Phipps for this since it was him who forced me to divert on my to a meeting in Canary Wharf to go to the Apple Store at Oxford Circus to pick up a DVI to VGA converter that he had forgotten to bring for a presentation we were doing. Centre stage in the store was the newly launched Macbook Air in the flesh and I could not resist taking a look at it. It was beautiful and I was smitten. Once back home I ordered one and then suffered the agony of waiting 6 weeks for it to arrive. So why take so long to blog about it. Well I wanted to use it for a while and make sure I was well out of the honeymoon period and had discovered all of it's faults so that could provide a more sensible analysis of it's strengths and weaknesses. Also at it's launch there was much talk of it's shortfalls and I wanted to see if these were really the terrible handicaps that many reviews were making out.

So nearly 1 year on how is my Macbook Air. It still remains my favorite piece if IT technology ever. It is just beautiful both to look at and to use. Is it perfect? NO it has just one minor flaw. Due to it's stunning looking thin design there is nowhere to attach a desk lock and for such a desirable piece of highly portable kit this is an issue. So what about the lack of DVD drive. Well I had one of those in all my previous laptops and rarely used it, in fact I was thinking of getting the optional extra from Toshiba that was an extra battery that slotted into the space left by removing the DVD drive in order to extend battery life. I actually bought the USB DVD drive with the Macbook and I have NEVER used it. So what about the lack of USB ports. NOT a problem I rarely attach anything to the 1 USB port I have. Most things connect with Bluetooth or WiFi, I no longer carry a bag full of USB sync cables and everything else I sync with my desktop machine at home. OK so surely the lack of a removeable battery is an issue. NO while I had additional batteries for previous laptops I was always forgetting to carry them or charge them and so rarely got any benefit from them and even if I did remember to charge them and carry them it extended my battery life to 4-5 hours which is what I get from my Air. OK so what about replacing it when it won't hold charge any more well I have 2 choices. Firstly I could send it back to Apple for them to replace it. Secondly I could read one of the dozens of blogs that explain how to buy a battery on ebay and do it yourself.

So we have done what is bad about the Air but what makes it so special. Well it is light. thin and stunningly good looking. Battery life is great (even on the HDD model that I have - my wife would not approve the budget for the SSD version). It is instant on/off when you open and close the lid. So much so that I have found that I no long use my PDA but go straight for the laptop. The famous Mac OS X GUI is just a joy to use and so productive. Finally the thing runs for weeks without the need for a reboot. My Windows laptop could not run for a full day without crashing or locking up and requiring a reboot. OK so Mac OS is not as solid as Solaris but it beats Windows and Linux in terms of stability as well as usability. I have been so pleased with the Mac OS usability that following a spyware infection on my desktop PC at home which took 5 days to clean off I decided to buy a Mac Mini to replace it. The built in webcam also makes it great for Skype Video which I use extensively to keep in touch with the kids when I travel. Their favorite game now is getting a guided video tour of Daddy's hotel using the free lobby wifi. Finally when I want to geek about I open a shell tool and there is a UNIX prompt offering me man, awk, perl, gcc and CLI access and with X11 server I can access all my applications on my Solaris server or SunRay server.

Oh yes. I still run OpenSolaris on my laptop. On the Air I run xVM VirtualBox with images for OpenSolaris, Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE.

So in summary if you want a portable desktop with removeable battery, copious I/O and a DVD drive get a Macbook Pro that is the right machine for you. If you want something similar size and weight to a netbook but with the CPU and memory of a desktop, with long battery life and stunning good looks buy a Macbook Air. The Air should be every road warriors weapon of choice. The phrase that I keep hearing from every Mac convert is "Isn't it great, it just works".

Posted at 10:11PM Feb 08, 2009 by Sean Harris in Mac  |  Comments[0]

The Romance of International Business Travel

For anyone who still lives under the illusion that international business travel is somehow cool, fun or romantic then read on. For those that have already realised this then you may want to skip to the last paragraph for some amusement. Wind back to Sunday evening. I was due to travel to Bangkok and duly arrived at Heathrow airport T4 just after 7pm for a 9.30pm flight. The terminal itself is going through major reconstruction work and on top of that seemed to be packed to capacity, certainly everywhere I went to try and get something to eat there were long queues and no free tables. As I was later to find out the flight was also packed to capacity. Shortly before we started to board at 9pm the forecast snow arrived in force. Staring out of the terminal building at the blizzard outside my heart fell knowing that the chance of the plane leaving on time had just fallen to zero, the same as the outside temperature. Heathrow is not exactly geared up for snow. It is something that happens every few years (rather than multiple times per year) and so the costs of not dealing with the snow properly are far less than the investments needed to properly equip for the snow and with relentless pressure from passengers for cheap flights what are they supposed to do. Anyway we duly boarded at around 9pm and once fully loaded the pilot announced that there would be a short delay of approximately 30 minutes while we waited for the de-icing rig to arrive. Some 2 or 3 hours later the de-icing rig arrived and started work only to run our of fluid part way through the job and had to return to base. One or two hours later it returned to start again once more to disappear part way through the job. A short while after this the pilot announced that the snow ploughs were unable to keep the runways open and that Heathrow was now officially shut and so we would off loaded from the plane. The only problem was that T4, that we were currently connected to, was now shut and unmanned so we would need to be taken by bus to T5. Around 3pm we were taken to T5 but not the arrivals area but one of the outlying terminal buildings requiring us then to get the shuttle train to arrivals. At immigration was total chaos with everyone clamouring to find out what was going on with wave after wave of people being off loaded into the hall and only 3 BA staff behind a small desk. Finally one BA staff member took the initiative and stood on a chair and called for quite. She said that all flights would be postponed by 24 hours and that no bags would be unloaded. We were to return to the airport 3 hours before our scheduled time but on Monday night rather than Sunday night. By now the queue at passport control was already 4 times longer than when I had arrived in immigration and the hall was full of people fighting to get to the BA desk. I decided to cut my losses and run before this lot moved o the Taxi rank. Outside after a short wait I managed to get a Taxi home and arrived back around 5am.  Knowing that I had already missed a nights sleep and that I would be unlikely to get any sleep for a second night (sat for 11+ hours in economy) I devised a cunning plan. If I stayed awake for another few hours and then slept most of the day I would minimise my jet lag when I arrived in Bangkok. So I sent a few emails to re-arrange meetings and to get my revised travel plans confirmed, had a couple of G+Ts and checked ot see if the kids school was shut or not (it was) before diving into my bed. Around 2pm I was woken by a call from my travel admin to tell me that while BA had confirmed earlier in the day the message that I had received at the airport they were now saying that the flight would not be leaving Monday evening and they were offering me a place on a flight for Friday evening. Considering that my meetings were booked for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this was a little pointless so I decided to cut my losses and cancel the trip. As an regular traveller will tell you the worst parts of any trip are the airport (check in, security and hanging about), the flight (sitting for hours in economy discomfort with nothing to do) and the jet lag and the upside only happens once you get there. I had managed to experience the airport, 6+ hours sat in economy and given my self jet lag and travelled precisely nowhere!

So what about my luggage you ask? Well this is where the fun really starts. On tuesday I thought I had better contact the airport to try and retrieve my suitcase. A very helpful gentleman told me that y suitcase was defintely in the airport (somewhere) and that they BA would deliver it back to me but to be patient because their systems were a little overloaded. He duely gave me tracking number and a website to check for progress on the return of my bag. Several times on the tuesday I checked the website to be told they they were still attempting to locate exactly where my bag was. On wednesday I checked and it told me that my bag was awaiting return to Heathrow due to arrive on the Thirsday morning on the BA 10. For those not in the know the BA 10 is the flight from Sidney to London Heathrow via ******** Bangkok *********. Clearly while I had been unable to make it to Bangkok my bag had sucessfully completed the journey on tuesday evening without me! On thursday afternoon a courier arrived at my house with my bag covered in baggage routing tags from Bangkok airport but otherwise unharmed. Clearly my bag has now decided that it has enough international travel experience to undertake these trips on it's own so I have applied for it's own passport and air miles account and will be teaching it about Sun technology and products so that it can take over completely from me and I will be able to relax at home without having to suffer the trauma of international travel.

Posted at 09:41AM Feb 06, 2009 by Sean Harris in Travel  |  Comments[0]

JavaOne - Final Thoughts

I was at Sun World in 1995 when Java was first previewed and I have attend JavaOne for business meetings a number of times in the late 90's and early 2000's (I never know how to write this) when I was Systems Engineering Manager for Sun's OEM Software team in EMEA. I have seen the debates rage over whether Java was fit for purpose on the desktop and was Java ever going to make it into consumer and mobile devices. Indeed working for OEM software when I did my team was key in getting Java into mobile devices working with the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Sagem and Samsung as well as working closely with mobile GSM operators in Europe. So what are the conclusions has Java had it's day? Absolutely not. The eco system is stronger than ever. In each of the sectors that it is used - desktop, server, consumer devices, mobile devices, smartcards and now real time systems it is the benchmark by which other technologies and solutions measure themselves. Will Java gain world domination and wipe out all other technologies and solutions? Of course not. Apart from the fact that choice is a good thing. Diversity and choice means that there is competition, which keeps everyone on their toes. Choice results in a larger and more vibrant overall market place - a rising tide floats all boats. Finally choice services more of the long tail rather than forcing everyone to suffer the lowest common denominator. Make no mistake however Java is not on it's way out any time soon.

Now to climb down from my soap box for a while. One thing that hit me at JavaOne this year was the ratio of Apple laptops to PC laptops. It was at least 50% Apple with the Macbook Pro seeming to be the weapon of choice for the majority of developers. This helped me to feel much better about the money that I lashed out a few months ago on a Macbook Air (more about that in a later post). The next thing that hit me having been out of the mainstream of Java for a few years was the uptake of OSGi in the application server space. When I was last actively involved in this it was firmly targeted at the home automation market but it now seems to be a key requirement for application servers going forward and it's inclusion in Glassfish v3 and Spring 2.5 are just two examples of this. The other big thing was the integration of scripting with Java (both desktop and server side) and the wide variety of scripting languages and frameworks - more choice!  The final big thing was open source. It is clear that open source is here to stay and will continue to get more deeply embedded and widely adopted in commercial tools and solutions. Increasingly commercial software companies are realising that hiding the source code for your application buys you nothing and opening up you code to the community buys you increased adoption, increase innovation and improved code quality. The keynote presenter from CERN made the statement also  that it was tax payers money from the community that had paid for their code development so surely the community had a right to see the results! Government organisations take note. If you develop software we have a right to see it and use it free of charge because we have already paid for it (sorry I have crept back onto my soapbox.

As I mentioned before I have attended JavaOne before in a business capacity and never had the chance to attend any of the technical sessions. This time was different and it was a real pleasure to geek out for a week and see the show from a different angle. I would seriously recommend it to anyone involved in Java technology, Java development or any web based development.

For reasons that I can't explain my travel agent decided to book me into the Sheraton at Fisherman's Wharf for this conference however this did mean that for this week I had the joy of using the cable car for my commute each day. A real treat that made my kids very jealous. Remember little boys never grow up. Their toys just get bigger and more expensive.

Posted at 12:04AM May 11, 2008 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

JavaOne - Day 4

The final day began with James Gosling's keynote. As usual it was littered with demos in fact too many to mention in full. The JMars visualiser, rather like google maps for Mars, looked impressive and since it is all available as open source it is open for anyone to use. The livescribe had sponsored a developer competition and my favourite was the JSR Jumble which allowed you to write the number of a JSR and have it look up the name and description of the JSR. The translator was also pretty impressive. The guy from CERN showed a number of the Java applications that they use from simple internal IT packages to systems for modelling data from the particle accelerator and managing a global grid. Tommy Junior, the driver-less car, cause quite a stir when it drove into the conference room. There was the now obligatory real time java demo delivered by Greg Bollella which this time feature blue wonder, a complete RTJS controller in a a box. It was sorting falling coloured balls. Years ago I tried to build a demo system that would sort just black and white balls that were free falling so I know some of the real time constraints involved so this for me was very impressive. Sure the compute performance in one sensor was probably equal to the entire compute performance that I had at my disposal but even so. And by the way Greg's demo worked, mine never did.

The was an excellent session today on Service Orientated Architecture and Java which gave a great approach to SOA that cut through all the hype from product and technology vendors and advicated a very sensible approach to SOA using the OASIS reference architecture and reference model.  Unfortunately the  Q&A was cut short when one of the presenters colapsed on the stage but I believe he was aright long term.

 There was also an excellent session on the 10 rules for scalable systems that was informative and entertaining at the same time and the presenter clearly had suffer the battle scars of building such systems and making some of the mistakes.

I also attended a session on the Maxine VM. A configurable and highly portable VM written almost entirely in Java. Currently a labs project and a long way from being a production VM it is experimenting with some fasinating ideas and the fact that the code will shortly be open sourced I am sure will lead to a whole host of interesting university research projects. A Java VM written in Java! I resisted the temptation to ask the presenter if he had also solved th eproblem of what came first - the chicken or the egg - largely because I feared that he would have given me a mathmatical proof of the solution to the problem that I stood no hope of following.

On a final note I recieved the following from the event organisers which I guess means that Java has finally been hit by a virus ;-)

"The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then."

 

Posted at 02:57AM May 10, 2008 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

JavaOne - Day 3

This afternoon's keynote from Motorola was very interesting and thought provoking. A very honest and unbiased look at the state of the mobile applications market as it is today and some predictions for the future. I am not sure that I agree with all of the conclusions (especially around the need for consolidation) but more of that in another post. One of the highlights of the day for me was a presentation from IBM entitled "The Desktop Java Technology Lovers Survival Guide". From the title I was not really sure what to expect but what was delivered was not at all what I expected. Not particularly technical it was a very entertaining look at the past and current state of large enterprise system software design and some predictions/warnings for the future. The speaker was very entertaining and the presentation filled with amusing anecdotes. Certainly a welcome break from the pages of code.

Another highlight for me was a session entitled "Designing Graphical Model-Driven Applications: Lego Mindstorm" as the presenter said in the introduction you are all here for at least one of there reasons.

• You are interested in UML modeling for code design
• You are interested in graphical tools for UI design
• You are a big kid and want to play with robots

That will be a yes on all three then!

The 2 presenters did a great job of trying to design an build most of the software on the fly and in the true tradition of live demo based presentations they had taken on more than could be done in the alloted hour which coupled with a couple of mistakes mean they were in a sprint to finish on time, fell slightly short of their total goal for the session but did finally get something running to the great delight of the crowd - even if the robot did ddrive itself off the edge of the demo table at one point. All that said it was extremely informative, good entertainment and fun. The only shame it that it was not filmed (at least I don't think so). The 2 presenters did a great job of trying to design an build most of the software on the fly and in the true tradition of live demo based presentations they had taken on more than could be done in the alloted hour which coupled with a couple of mistakes mean they were in a sprint to finish on time, fell slightly short of their total goal for the session but did finally get something running to the great delight of the crowd - even if the robot did ddrive itself off the edge of the demo table at one point. All that said it was extremely informative, good entertainment and fun. The only shame it that it was not filmed (at least I don't think so).

Another impressive piece of coding was the session entitled "Extreme GUI Makeover: In the Real World" which really showed what can be done with Java in GUI design. This was a Java replacement GUI for a dusty cobol application and was very impressive. The presenter said that he would be posting the code on his website so you can go take a look at it.

Posted at 04:35AM May 09, 2008 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

JavaOne - Day 2

The key note today from Oracle was a little disappointing consisting of a (very slick) demo and presentation of their current family of enterprise development and deployment tools. Not what you come to expect from JavaOne.

There is a lot of emphasis at this JavaOne on rich user experience, combining scripting with Java in the JVM and developing social infrastructure.

I attended a very informative session from Google and hi5 on how to implement a social networking site based on the Open Social  Container using the Apache Shindig incubator implementation of the Open Social Container and the Open Social APIs. The guy from hi5 gave some interesting insights into the issues facing someone developing and deploying an infrastructure designed to support a viral uptake and some of the pitfalls to avoid.

I also attended a session on jMaki that was liberally littered with code examples and demos which helped to break up the usual death by bullet points (when will someone develop a presentation package that only supports diagrams and has no bullet function - I do not need to look at your speaker notes while you read them to me). Unfortunately the demos seemed to fall over on a regular basis which did not help to hold the attention. Still at least it gave it credibility as a proper developer event presentation rather than a product sales pitch.

I followed this with a session on Growing Open Source Communities based on the experiences of the OpenJDK community. A good guide for any company thinking of moving it's development into the Open Source realm especially in combination with the later session by Simon.

The session on creating compelling user interface experiences was queued half way around the Moscone Centre and since I have a pass that only allows me to be wait listed for a seat decided to cut my losses and head for Simon Phipps' presentation on the challenges facing the Open Source community in the future as more and more commercial organisations become more deeply involved in open source and more commercial software is based (at least in part) on open source components. As usual from Simon it was a thought provoking session littered with Simon's own personal photographs to re-enforce his points (count the number of bullets in this presentation). Simon recommended attending any presentation given by Eben Moglen someone with whom I (a ashamed to admit) I am not familiar but will be looking into.

To finish off the day I attended a session looking at how to include media (in particular video and audio) in Java and JavaFX applications. Once again the presentation was built almost entirely from code examples and demos which served perfectly to get across the presenters points. While I am not sure how well this will come across with just an audio recording and a copy of the slides it is an excellent introduction to the technology.

Posted at 02:30AM May 08, 2008 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

JavaOne - Day 1

The keynote started with the usual glitz and included a dance troop as the kick off. Rich Green went on to introduce a number of new technologies and a number of demos that suffer the traditional JavaOne demo demons! There was a demon of the Amazon Kindle which was unable to reach the network!

The new JRE 6 update 10 (formally know as the Consumer JRE) which has a number of interesting features. The first is the componentisation of the JRE download. This means that now the JRE has an initial download size of 2Mbytes rather than the traditional 15MBytes. Additional components (API sets) are download as required by applications or applets or are trickled down in the background. New quick start technology improves the start up time for a cold start JRE. Finally one of the features demoed was the ability to be able to take an applet running in a browser and be able to drag and drop it onto the desktop as a desktop application. This allows the applet to continue running after the browser is closed and even be launched on future occasions as a desktop application independently of the browser. The demo application itself kept locking during the keynote demo but at Bob Brewin's Technical General Session later in the day the same demo worked perfectly. This is enabled by the fact that the JRE plugin now runs in a separate process from the browser. JavaWeb start has allowed users to load (correctly packaged applets) to be loaded within a browser or as a stand alone application for a number of years but this was not seamless to the user. The new functionality is!

The new release of Glassfish (v3) has also been componentised (a theme of the day) so that the runtime at startup now is less than 100kbytes. Through project babelfish scripting languages have now become a 1st class citizen of the Glassfish environment. Glassfish v3 is also not completely OSGi compliant. Also included is the self registration of 3rd party extension APIs making to much easier for developers to include them and use them. 

Rich also announce Project Hydrazine and Project Insight.  Project Hydrazine promises to offer en end to end service deliver platform based on cloud/utility computing for service delivery all developed in open source. Project Insight will then allow the developer of these services to run a series of analytics to to look at usage of a service and discover business models and opportunities.

There was also during the day much demonstration of applications developed in JavaFX offering rich user experiences developed in hours and days rather than weeks and months.

The grand finally was Neil Young demoing what he is doing with BluRay DVD. This was extremely compelling. So far I have resisted the urge to acquire and form of next gen DVD. For once I wanted to see the standards battle play out before I backed any horse (I am also looking for some additional functionality which I can't seem to find today but more of that in another post). The Neil Young BluRay however may be the thing that drives me to purchase a device. It allows the user to browse through images, articles and videos while listening to the music as well as navigating the music and seamlessly accessing additional content from the net. What the video you will see what I mean. As Neil Young put it - "This demo is pre-recorded and not live so we KNOW that it WILL work".

Posted at 06:04PM May 07, 2008 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Community One

This week I am in San Francisco attending the JavaOne developers conference. The day before JavaOne I attended Sun's Open Source software conference - CommunityOne. The big announcement was the availability of the binary distribution of Open Solaris. The is the first main release of what was known in development as project Indiana. It includes a new package management system (IPS) similar to the Debian system with online package repositories. I have been using the developer previews of Indiana and have been extremely impressed and I can't wait to try the new Open Solaris release. Another new interesting feature for developers is D-Light using Sun Studio 12. Open Solaris is the first OS release to use ZFS as it's default filesystem. The demo of ZFS at the keynote makes watching the webcast worth while involving disk drives, an anvil, a sledgehammer and a power drill. The rest I leave to your imagination or watch the recording. Great for releasing aggression.

Another announcement was the new release of Virtual Box (version 1.6). This  brings support for MAC OS and Open Solaris out of beta and into the full product. Another cool feature that was demoed was the ability to have virtual applications on your native desktop. What does this mean? Well typically when using a type II V12N technology you have a Native window in which the VM is running and you see the complete virtual desktop with all the virtualised applications running as sub windows within the virtualised desktop. Now you can have individual virtualised applications running as separate windows on your native desktop without the need to have a separate virtual desktop window. Each virtualised application then appears much more like a native application. Another interesting feature is the ability to read and boot from VMDK files. At the moment it can't create VMDK files but it can run and edit them.

 Another interesting session that I attended was project Social Site. I need to look into this further.

A final note was it was interesting to note that at this developer event the large number of MAC users there were. A quick count at the sessions that I attended they made up 50% of the laptops visible.

Posted at 09:14PM May 06, 2008 by Sean Harris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Indiana Developer Preview II

The latest developer preview for Project Indiana is now available for download. I have just installed it on my Toshiba M5 and I am seriously considering canceling my recent order for a MacBook. Wow!!! It is great. It is being presented next week at the London Open Solaris User Group. Give it a spin you won't regret it.

Posted at 03:40PM Feb 13, 2008 by Sean Harris in Open Source  |  Comments[0]

No planes but trains and automobiles

Many people live under the impression that to travel for business is some how romantic and pleasurable. These are typically people who rarely travel and when they do it is for vacation. The times when it was romantic to travel (for business or pleasure) are long passed as I hope this example will show.

 I recently travelled to Paris with a couple of other people to talk to a group of developers about the latest and greatest technology from Sun. We left mid afternoon from St. Pancras on the EuroStar (I have long since stopped flying to Paris due to the delays, cancellations and general discomfort). Our plan was to arrive in Paris in time to check into the hotel and have some dinner. When we arrived at the hotel and tried to check in we were greeted  by the concierge who explained that the hotel was over booked (due to a large party extending their stay) and that they were in the process of transferring us to another hotel near by. Thankfully the guys that I was with were pretty chilled and so when he offered a free drink at the bar while we waited for arrangements to be made they agreed immediately. A short while later we were loaded into a taxi courtesy of the hotel to head for our new hotel. At this point the taxi driver started demanding that we direct him to where we wanted to go. We had no idea. We had been told by the first hotel that they would arrnage and pay for the taxi and tell him where to go. The taxi driver started to get very upset when we told him that we had no idea. Luckily we had the phone number of the first hotel and so a quick call to them cleared up the confusion and tald the taxi driver that he was going in the wrong direction which got him more upset. Then we remebered that we had another colleague due in on a much later train. A quick call back to the hotel to find out if he was also going to be moved, yes, and a quick call and SMS to give him details of the change and all was back on track - we thought.

 The following morning we were up and into a taxi heading for the clients site. We were complaining bitterly at the incompetance of our travel agent who appeared to have booked us in a hotel on the opposite side of Paris from the client's site. After an hour in a taxi we arrived at the street name that we had been given but there was no sign of the clients building. A quick couple of phone calls and we managed to find out that the street name that we had was correct but the client was based in a suburb of Paris. A quick look at google maps and we reolised that this was back across town near to our hotel. The travel agents logic now becoming clearer ;-). So back in a taxi and we finally arrived at the clients site about 1 hour late. On leaving the clients site we decided to hail a taxi in the street. After 45 minutes of trying we have up and went into a bar to plan the next steps. After a beer I managed to get the courage and confidence in my French (which is very poor) to go and ask the bar man to call us a taxi. Now the comedy started. The bar did not have a telephone but the bar man did have the number of a taxi company. No problem we all had GSM mobiles. Ah but my French is weak face to face over a poor GSM connection it was never going to work. At this point one of the locals in the bar took pity on us and offered to help. I explained that we needed a taxi to take 4 people or 2 taxis and where our hotel was and he arranged the cab. There was a brief argument between him and the taxi firm because they were not happy to take a booking from a mobile phone and wanted us to call from a fixed line. He explained that there was no fixed line in the place and that we were foreigners who were lost and needed a taxi and they then agreed to take the booking. That evening after a 2 mile walk, due to misunderstanding the directs from the hotel, we found a very pleasant restaurant and enjoyed an excellent meal. Things were looking up.

The following morning we checked out of the hotel and asked them to arrange a taxi to take us back to the client. We told that they could not because the taxi drivers were on strike today. Dam. What now. A quick look at a public transport map revealed that there was a tram service that went nearly door to door. If only we had known that the night before. Our only minor problem was that the ticket machines had been vandalised so we had to board the tram without a ticket but sincer no ticket inspector arrived this was a non issue. Once we came to leave the client we went back to the tram station and decided to take the tram one stop and then change to the RER or the metro. We were able to purchase tickets this time on the platform and off we went. I was pleased to see that the tram ticket also covered us for the RER and the Metro. I validated my ticket on the tram but in the crush did not realise that the other 3 had not. When we tried to enter the RER we then ran into ptoblems. The barriers did not open properly for me but I was able to barge my way through as did one of my collegues. The other 2 could not. We decided that this was because they had not validated their tickets so they went back to validate their tickets. When they finally returned their tickets still did not work but by now we were running out of time so they climbed over the barrier and off we went. We had valid tickets - or so we thought - so what could we be doing wrong. When we came to change trains on teh RER we were now at the peak rush hour. The platform was about 6 people deep when we arrived and it was 15 minutes before a train arrived. We had to make this train so we put the slimmer guy in front and two ex rugby forwards drove then hard at the open train doors. We were on. At the Gare Du Nord when we came to leave three of us managed ot exit no problem but one guy was stuck behind the barriers. This time it was 10ft high sliding glass doors so there was no way of climbing over. Finally we through him one of our tickets and he came out OK. At this point we reolised that he had never validated his ticket on entering the system. We made it to the EuroStar with about 10 minutes to spare. On route we further examined our subway tickets and the guide map we had been given at the hotel and reolised our error. The tickets that we had were valid for the RER  but only within the limits of Paris (not the suburbs). We had boarded the RER at La Defense which is a suburb and so our tickets were not valid. Good job we did not encounter any ticket inspectors. The EuroStar gave us a chance to relax and reflect on the excitement of our trip.

Unfortunately for me it was not over yet. We all parted company at St. Pancras and headed off in our own directions. I arrived at Paddington at around 9pm and which I bought my ticket mused on the fact that the station was rather busy for this time of night. Then a glance up at the board for the next traing to Reading and what did I see - Cancelled, Delayed, Delayed, Delayed, Cancelled, Delayed, Delayed. Then I began to notice that none of the trains platforms where warming up their engines and that the lack of the usual roar of deisel engines ment that you could hear the hum of voices from the crowd on the concourse. Shartly afterwards there was an announcement explaining that the line was closed near Slough due to a fatality on the line and so no trains were going into or out of the station at the moment except those going to Heathrow. So 3 choices. Sit it out, try going down to Waterloo and ramming onto the milk train from Waterloo to Reading or take the train to Heathrow and the coach on from there. I opted for the former and went and curled up in the vestibule of a 1st class carraige of a 125 safe in the knowledge that it would leave at some time and that it's first stop would be Reading. Eventually I made it to Reading but too late for a connection onwards so I went with everyone else to join the long queue and 45 minute wait for a taxi.

When I finally got home very late I was able to reflect on the joys, pleasure and romance of modern travel and wonder if it might be time for a change in career.

Posted at 03:08PM Feb 10, 2008 by Sean Harris in Travel  |  Comments[0]