My second day at JavaOne started off with Joe Winchester, one of the most entertaining speakers at this conference. I still remember last year’s session: first, I helped to prepare one of the demos and all sorts of technical issues came up during this but eventually we managed to get it running; secondly, it was standing room only and Joe drew many laughs with his presentation. This year’s presentation was about “User Interfaces: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly“. Basically, it was along the same line as last year’s presentation. Joe is brilliant in finding all sorts of user interface screw-ups. After the session he told me that he is not actively looking for this but just stumbles over them while browsing. He started his talk with some remarks on the paper-based view of the world. WYSIWYG still dominates the design of most user interfaces but also limits their design. Jeff Raskin, the creator of the Macintosh, hated this view. He compared it to a Boeing 747 with its wings ripped off and used as a bus. Joe then made fun of desperate attempts of developers to cover up their mistakes, like using animation to distract the user from a slow and unusable user interface. He also demonstrated some progress bar examples which just kidded the user (without the developer’s intention). The culmination of his talk were two videos about the user interface of a scale in the fruit/vegetable department of a supermarket. The first video showed Joe trying to weigh some bananas and the scale keeps telling him that it can’t do it because it is out of stock which slightly contradicted the fact that Joe put real bananas on the scale. In the second video Joe tried to weigh some tomatoes on the same scale and the scale asked him what kind of tomatoes he has got and for each variance showed him exactly the same picture. At the end Joe called out at the Web developers to get serious after having more than enough fun. What I missed in his talk were solutions to the problems he showed. Joe told me afterwards that he still had one third of the slides left at the end, so maybe he could have talked about these solutions. Overall, the session was well above average, but I think it was not as good as last year’s session. It also drew less attendees than last year which is true for all the sequels I have seen so far.

The next session titled “Filthy Rich Clients: Talk Dirty to Me” was held by Chet Haase and Romain Guy. They claimed that this is a presentation based on a book based on a presentation. Hence, rather than wait for their book “Filthy Rich Clients” one could get a good overview of their ideas about pimping up a Swing GUI. I first expected something like “Extreme GUI Makeover” but soon realized that this was just the low-level version of this session. They talked about different approaches in achieving better GUI performance. The timing framework developed by Chet Haase was another topic. Most time was spent on how to achieve coolness, like blur, drop shadows, spring, morphing etc. I didn’t mind the low-levelness of this talk but it was kind of boring. Romain tried to make some jokes which did not catch on but maybe it was still too early in the morning for him or the audience or both.

“Extreme GUI Makeover 2007” was the second sequel of the well-known user interface presentation by Romain Guy and his colleagues. As with most movies after too many sequels this show is getting a bit long in the tooth. This time they chose to enhance a “real” business application, in this case a real estate application. After some minor improvements to the application’s appearance such as changing the look and feel, adding customized components and a nice splash screen they showed off some impressive changes to a table. Their cell renderer was quite complex and included pictures, several lines of text and spanning. The coolest feature was their sorting animation which visualized how rows changed their position when being sorted. They also created an out-of-the-frame non-rectangular and transparent window which tracked the current selection in the table like a kind of tooltip. Finally, Romain demonstrated how to convey exceptions to a user in a funny way (how about developers covering up their mistakes). He created an animation which ripped off the surface of the window and showed the ugly internals of the application which had gone wrong. To summarize, I think they should not try to create another sequel next year but come up with something completely different.

This day’s sessions were informative and sometimes entertaining. However, I was missing last years’ excitement. Maybe cool Java desktop applications are becoming just normal which is a good sign.

The first session I attended was titled “Java Desktop“. It was good to hear about the progress Sun is making to provide Java on as many desktops as possible. The vast majority of Java VMs out there are now some version of Java SE rather than the outdated Microsoft VM and about 60% of the PCs are equipped with Java by default. If you have the impression that Java is mainly used on the back-end you have to think again. According to Sun, most Java development time is spent on Java desktop applications. This clearly underlines the importance of Java client development. Maybe it is also a sign that Java development for the desktop is still too hard and takes too much time.

In any case, they are working hard on several issues to lower the barrier for installation of the Java VM and the use of Java applications on the desktop:

• A coldstart of the Java VM, which now takes way too long (5-10 secs) will get a lot faster. Starting the Java VM puts a heavy load on file system access. Hence, they preload the necessary files in the Windows disk cache to bring down startup time.
• The JRE install will get much smaller, i.e. one has only to download a kernel of about 2MB rather the full 13MB. All the other components will get downloaded either lazily or on demand. Typical applications need only a fraction of the entire JRE, for example SwingSet requires about 3.5 MB, Limewire about 4MB.
• Another pain for developers is figuring out the JVM versions available on a desktop. Java Web Start already does a pretty good job, but for applets it’s a challenging task. Sun will provide a number of JavaScripts that help in figuring out JVM versions. An upcoming Java plugin (Windows only) will help even more.

All these extensions will be made available as part of an update for Java 6 for consumers in the first half of 2008. Sun’s goal is to make the Java SE platform the consumer web client of the future. This is really good news for technologies like UltraLightClient which try to leverage the power of Java, both on the server and the client side.

The next session was about the Swing Application Framework. Hans Muller, one of the leads, gave a brief introduction into this framework. The Swing Application Framework is targeted at small and medium sized Swing applications. One of the goals was to keep it so simple that you can cover the entire framework in an hour’s presentation, which Hans actually did. This is in contrast to most application frameworks which try to cover the entire application problem space and usually turn out as untameable monsters. The Swing Application Framework just handles the few issues which probably every Swing developers had to find some solution for. They are:

• Resources: easy resource conversion and even resource injection into properties by annotation.
• Actions: actions are defined by annotating methods, their state can be bound to a property, and the action attributes can be loaded from resources as well.
• Tasks: everything you need to run background tasks including notifying the user about the state of the background task.
• Storing session state: make your application’s state persistent and reload it when starting the application again.

If you are developing Swing-based application then have a look at this framework. It most likely will make your life easier. The framework is planned for inclusion in Java 7.

My third session was about “Easy deployment is finally here“. Basically, it was a more in-depth rerun of “Java Desktop”. The only addition was a demonstration of the new Java installer which is definitely more user friendly. Java updates will also become more lightweight and they will update in place rather than proliferating Java versions on your PC. One remark of Ethan Nicholas slightly amused me: he claimed that Mac users have to get a new version of the operating system in order to update their Java version which is simply not true.

The last session was “Swing in a Multithreaded World“. This was mostly about the SwingWorker class which is part of Java 6. It gave some valuable tips and tricks how to efficiently use the SwingWorker class and how to implement custom executors. The presenter was talking really fast, it felt like he tried to cover up for his Russian accent which made it hardly comprehensible. As a result, the one hour session was over after 30 minutes. If you are using an earlier version of Java: there is a backport of the SwingWorker implementation available at https://swingworker.dev.java.net/.

JavaOne traditionally opens with a keynote hosted by John Gage. In contrast to previous years, John Gage just gave the introduction and pretty soon handed over to Rich Green, the head of Sun’s software division. For a JavaOne newbie the keynote might be quite impressive, but as a 10th year alumni I am used to all the marketing glitz and it’s easier to focus on the real content. In addition, I have seen so many announcements at JavaOne which turned out irrelevant. Therefore, the announcements have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, the keynote gives you a feeling about the general direction Java is taking. From my point of view, there were two remarkable announcements:

• Sun is really serious about opensourcing Java. It’s a daunting task, though. They are still not able to completely put the JDK into the open, but most of it can now be downloaded from http://openjdk.java.net/. What’s even more important is the fact that the TCK (technology compatibility kit) will be available as well. Open source implementations are now able to check compatibility without throwing up quite some money.

• Java on the desktop is a big topic again. Sun finally realized that being just on the backend is not good enough. They want to get Java into the hands of end users and consumers. Therefore, they really focus on the desktop and on mobile devices. The most important issue here is to make Java easily available, i.e. easy download, install, and start-up. I will write more about this in an upcoming blog entry. To complement this, it should be easier for developers to create Rich Internet Applications. Today, you can achieve almost everything using Java and Swing, but it just takes too long. JavaFX will fill in the gaps. It allows for creating content and user interfaces descriptively. Whether Sun can compete against Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight remains to be seen, though. Consistent with Sun’s history there aren’t any tools available yet. They are promised for later this year. Hey guys, tools are as important as the technology. That’s why Microsoft is so successful with Joe developer – they get the tools early on. Sun also salvaged the intellectual property of SavaJe, which was prominently announced at last year’s keynote, and will release it as JavaFX Mobile. They promise to make this freely available to mobile devices manufacturers which again spells good news for RIAs, since this makes Swing a reality on mobile devices.

Surprisingly, Java EE did not get mentioned at all. I think there are two reasons for this. First of all, Java is well entrenched in the enterprise backend, it’s the desktop where Sun has to catch up. And secondly, Sun does not have to announce anything in this area, the next version of Java EE is still quite far away.

Last year Sun promised to make this year’s conference carbon neutral. Apparently, they heavily underestimated the effort to measure the impact of JavaOne on carbon dioxide emission. Now they are asking the attendants to come up with ideas how to measure that. At least Sun is thinking about these issues and keeps trying. Being a Mac guy, it was good to see that the only demo machines at the keynote were two Apple laptops, apart from the handheld devices. A few years ago Apple had to try hard to get some attention at JavaOne. Nowadays, you see lots of MacBooks and even Sun cares more about this platform. On a last note, Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun, should come to the conclusion whether he is a developer or an executive. From the waist down his Jeans speak “I am a developer like you guys”, but his formal jacket has written executive all over it. Why did he leave out the tie? At least, Rich Green did some kind of Steve Jobs impersonation with a black short-sleeve T-shirt and Jeans (yes, I know the real Steve Jobs always wears a black turtleneck).