JavaOne 2008 wrapup

This week I visited the JavaOne 2008 conference in San Francisco. A lot of impressions and a great time with Java coders from all over the world. As tradition demands the conference started with a T-shirt tossing James Gosling followed by some 80 hours of technical sessions and BOFs. A few impressions...

Java+You

This years theme was kind of a SUN imposed mantra. There was no escape and well, rightly so. Ubiquitous computing is here and Java is everywhere, literally in millions of devices over the world and growing fast. Take for example Blu-ray now that HD DVD is out of business? SUN even got Neil Young to testify to the Java+You theme by promoting his multimedia archives project and how it was impossible for him to make it happen until Blu-ray came along. I must admit that the project itself is very cool, but a rock star at a tech conference saying "Playstation 3" about five times? Not sure about that, maybe you better keep on rocking in a free world Neil ;)

Some more nice examples demonstrated at the conference: The Sentilla Mote, a mini computer instrumenting anything from bridges to vinyards in the Napa valley and even the JavaOne conference itself. A very cool example of pervasive computing. And finally my personal favorite definitly was the Pulse smartpen from Livescribe, an amazing tool that allows you to write while recording audio at the same time and linking it together for playback at any time amongst other things and it comes with an SDK. I just had to get one :)

FX on the frontend?

If there was one thing you could not escape from at JavaOne 2008 it was JavaFX (or Adobe Flex for that matter). Obviously SUN had no choice after last years announcements but in reality I must say the current status was a little disappointing. During the opening session there where some demo's and although some failed miserably I must admit there was also one very cool demo that showed up to 200 HD videos being rendered while moving over a 3D globe. Still, it is not stable yet, the tooling isn't up to standards yet and the TV and Mobile platforms announced for Q1 2009 did not look very promissing yet. It will be interesting to see what happnes over the next few months. Although Adobe, at this point, is clearly miles ahead with a production ready and rich Flex/AIR framework I'm not putting all my money on it yet. Remember, Java is everywhere and that means that when they do get it right it will be available on every device in any device running Java in one simple update. That may proof to be enough to recover in the end.

Modularization is hot!

As expected there was a lot to do about modularization. SUN is holding on to the Java Module System (JSR-277) and intend to make this specification a part of J2SE 7. Although they are putting some effort into alignment with the OSGi this does not look very promising as they are not really addressing the dynamics in the module layer. A good presentation on OSGi was given by Peter Kriens and BJ Hargrave and there was a lot of news in this area. SpringSource has release their own application platform entirely based on an OSGi kernel and even the new Glassfish, SUN's open source application server, has adopted OSGi into their micro kernel. In short, OSGi is getting more and more momentum but will it be enough?

So much for now,
Bram

ps. We (the NLJUG) pwnd the Brazilians according to the man :D