The Planetarium

Is it hump day already ? Day two: all about smaller devices !

More App Stores

The day started out with a keynote by Sony-Ericsson, who, guess what, are opening an app store for Java ME apps ! Together with the previous day's announcement from Verizon opening up their application developer model to Java ME, and of course Sun's new Java Store, the Planetarium's prediction that this is the year of the app store, really is coming true !

JavaFX Mobile 1.2

JavaFX Mobile developers are getting that performance boost as part of the JavaFX 1.2 release (20% in runtime perf, about 1/3 reduction in compiler output). And of course all the other goodies like the cross device UI controls.

Eric showed great new JavaFX apps at the Sun Mobility keynote: ReallyMe for social proximity, and PayPal (pictured) for mobile payments.

JavaFX Mobile Phones

Sony-Ericsson wrote a Twitter client (perhaps not as good as this one) live in their keynote and deployed it to three of their JavaFX phones, including those running WindowsMobile and SymbianOS). Best of all, JavaFX Mobile 1.2 phones are on sale at JavaOne, some even got hurled at the Mobility Keynote.

Java ME

The testing framework Java Verified goes into open source, and plays a central role in the new anti-fragmentation initiative JATAF (behind which Orange and Vodafone threw their support today), Java ME 3.0 SDK running on a MAC is on show at Java Utopia, and the recent PhoneMe milestone 4 release.

And in preview for the end of the year....

JavaFX (running on embedded Java SE on Linux) seen running on a new Qualcomm smartbook, the JavaFX TV platform running on the LG TV.

Halfway through the first day of JavaOne 2009, so much has already happened !

There'll be more about JavaFX and Java ME tomorrow, but here's the announcements about Java SE and JavaFX so far.

The Java Store
What's the thing that will allow Java and JavaFX developers to get their apps out to a massive audience ? You knew it was coming ! The Java Store doing a restricted preview of its late summer grand opening, which means you need to sign up to try it out. The front end is a JavaFX application, the backend, which also includes the Java Warehouse, where developers will submit applications that show up in the store, is a Java EE application running on Glassfish. The first iteration is for desktop applications, with mobile apps coming later.

JavaFX 1.2
Surprise ! There's a new mobile emulator, there's a long list of new cross device GUI components, layouts, support for RSS and ATOM feeds, the startup on the desktop is about 40% quicker. Try out the new samples. And there's preview versions of JavaFX on Solaris, Linux.

JavaFX.next
JavaFX on TV, as seen on an LG TV set-top box ! A new JavaFX Authoring tool ! Totally new super fast graphics stack for JavaFX. All three by the end of this year.

Java SE
Java SE 6u14 is out with the new 64bit browser plugin, and an evaluation version of the new G1 collector. The preview of JDK 7 is released (based on Milestone 3), and a first sighting of Project Jigsaw, showing the JDK partitioned into a set of small modules: jdk-base, jdk-awt, jdk-swing, jdk-tool etc that can be loaded (quickly!) with minimal dependencies.

Deja vu moment
Rewriting StarOffice in JavaFX ?

Some big names on stage already: eBay, Rim, Sony, Verizon, Intel. Stay tuned for a wrapup later on.

See you next week !

Or, stick The Planetarium in your favorite feed reader to get all the show news.

Or, follow The Planetarium on Twitter from the show.

If you believe everything that you read, then you have some surprises in store at next week's JavaOne conference.

A) Its going to be the last one.
B) Sun's going to launch an app store
C) Microsoft is giving a keynote
D) You'll see a BluRay player streaming content.
E) There'll be this crazy Java Utopia thing in the pavillion hall
F) Sony-Ericsson will announce something big about mobility and Java
G) You'll get a sighting of Project Jigsaw in action

But, you've probably been before: JavaOne, all its organization and chaos, never works out how people think it will.

That's the fun of it :)

Is it because of Madonna and Justin Timberlake ? Our life experiences being compressed to bursts of 160 characters ? Pecha Kucha ? Our long, satisfying URLs being reduced to a bite-sized snack ? What is it that's fuelling a proliferation of articles and blogs proclaiming a time bound learning experience for developers. Even the normally fad-resistent Planetarium has been know to fall victim !

Got 5 minutes ? Catch up on 10 years of Netbeans, create a JavaFX drawing app, learn the technology for representing Java objects as XML and vice-versa, deploy a JNLP application, write a test for Java Persistence (or go the whole hog: write a Java EE app), or create a JavaFX media player ?

How about 10 minutes ? Devx appears to be trying to corner this market, or you can buy the book, but otherwise you can take your pick from: deploying an applet with the deployment toolkit, use log4j in Eclipse, learn ant, Python, or JavaFX from saying hello, to triggers and databinding to invoking RESTful web services.


With the luxury of 15 minutes to spare on something like JavaFX, you could learn the language, or see what you can do with the graphics.

Just think what you could learn in a whole week !

Ahh, San Francisco in June. It has much to recommend it, in particular the JavaOne conference (cheaper if you sign up now). If you've never been before, this gives you a taste (or maybe this: illicit yet effective ?).

With more than 4 submitted proposals for every talk slot, its taken a couple months for the review teams, made up of people inside (your own Janitor included) and outside Sun, to work through the abstracts. With odds like that, and most of the talks or BOFs submitted in the four categories of: Core Technologies, Mobility, Services, and RIA looking very much like the kind of thing you'd want to go to (and even fill out the comment form for), its grim work to have to say no to so many.

This week, most of the emails got sent to let submitters know if they got lucky. If you were one of them, now's the time to start getting those slides and demos done !