The Planetarium

The Devoxx conference is something of a shapeshifter. One of the 'european JavaOnes', it grew out of the Belgian JUG, has undergone a number of name changes, and now has shifted up a month, starting this year on November 16th instead of its early December slot.

One thing has remained consistent though: its a well-attended conference with a lot of up to date and high quality technical content.

For anyone interested in JDK 7, or JavaFX you should hop online and get planning: many of the Sun engineers involved in those projects are already signed up to speak.

Closing out a busy week here at Devoxx, the release of JavaFX and JDK 7 news have been the talk of the town !

Kicking off the official conference part of Devoxx, your very own Janitor gave the first keynote (slides here) counting down the top 10 things about JavaFX you need to know. JavaFX team-Devoxx: Richard, Martin, Josh and Jasper showed four JavaFX applications, built with the 1.0 release. Like, JavaFX HD video apps (like this one), a JavaFX media cabinet shown on a popular Java ME phone. And wowed the crowd by using JavaFX to bring the huge movie screen size static backdrop on the stage to life with a beautiful Devoxx-themed animated design created in Photoshop and Illustrator and exported into NetBeans with the JavaFX Production Suite. Reactions to seeing JavaFX 1.0 for the first time have been very good.

Meanwhile, Devoxx attendees have been busily expressing their wants and needs on the whiteboards between sessions. Questions like Which language ?, Thinking of JavaFX ?, Which VM ?, Which JDK 7 language feature ? and even  Worst Blog ? attracted attention all week.

The next day, Josh gave an entertaining talk about the next generation Java puzzlers, followed by Mark Reinhold who keynoted on Java Modularity and JDK 7. As you read here on the Planetarium, Project Jigsaw will modularize the JDK, you will get a new low pause garbage collector, better performance, language changes (see Joe's blog), and there will be new APIs too: NIO2, Swing App Framework, Annotations on Java types and a host of smaller features like the XRender graphics pipeline, SCTP support, unicode 5 and so on. JDK 7 will preview at JavaOne 2009 (don't forget to file a talk) and ship in a little over a year's time.

Sessions galore. Like Alex and Brian on the work in the VM to support multiple languages, and Richard and Josh on JavaFX in Practice: with a surprising number of questions about developing JavaFX on mobile. Hanging with half the JavaPosse off mike (though they have been broadcasting all week), Belgian beer, twittering, bumping into old friends, a Devoxx movie and suddenly today is the last day. What a week !

The Planetarium will be taking a break for the next week, but back right before the holidays with more news about what's been going on in the world of Java SE, Java ME, JavaFX and JavaCard (which, by the way, all Belgians have at least one of).

The Planetarium is brought to you from Devoxx all week.

Devoxx is full ! The first two days are mostly in a University format: real in depth 3 hour sessions. After bumping into Devoxx organizer, Stephan Janssen (pictured left and whacked here) working the front desk, the Planetarium Janitor dropped in on a few sessions.

Like the first JavaFX session, where a highlight, after working through the language and API features, was in response to a question as to how to create a media player, Richard Bair answered it by coding one up in front of the packed crowd.

And the Groovy session where Guillaume Laforge showed some really neat examples of how compact Groovy can be, all running on the JVM, with a high ratio of application logic to syntax: in his words a high 'business density'.

And Chet's impromptu Adobe session on Flex and Flash, and what's coming up in Gumbo, the next version of Flex. Chet is such a natural presenter and stepped in at the last minute when someone else had to cancel.

As if that wasn't exciting enough, the Janitor is taking part in a JavaFX Launch in Second Life event today (Tuesday) at 1pm Pacific Time, where he will be interviewed by John Erickson from Dr Dobbs. So charge up your avatars, and stop on by for that.

No, the Janitor can't see Russia from the Planetarium, instead he brings a reminder list for ya.

The Devoxx conference (the euro-JavaOne and previously called Javapolis), this December, has an open call for papers. The Euro-JavaOne, it gets bigger every year. Why not submit something before it closes October 15th ?

Don't forget to vote for your favorite software projects at the Developer.com Product of the Year Awards. Voting ends Monday.

And, the JCP is holding its elections for the Executive Committee, check out the election website. Right now, JCP members can vote to ratify the candidates nominated by the PMO. Next month, JCP members can vote for the open seats. Check out the voting and attendence record of the Executive Committee to help decide who to vote for !!