JavaOne 2008 Day 3
I started the third day with a presentation by Cameron Purdy, “Top 10 Patterns for Scaling Out Java™ Technology-Based Applications”. This was exactly what I expect from a JavaOne session, well thought-out, conceptually convincing and not getting lost in technical intricacies. He clearly pointed out the stumbling blocks on the way to scalablity. I highly recommend you to get the slides (unfortunately, they are not available yet).
After that I attended “The JavaServer Faces 2.0 Platform Specification” to get an impression what to expect from JSF. In order to prove the popularity of JSF they showed a slide with job trends for different Web technologies. Struts is still no. 1 by far, though declining. JSF is no. 2, but Rails is catching up and might overtake JSF soon. The main goals for release 2.0 are: 1) Make custom components much easier to develop, 2) AJAX support, 3) Page description language, 4) Reduce the configuration burden and 5) Provide for better compatibility between different JSF providers. However, it looks like JSF is evolving at glacial speed (no different from the past). The release is scheduled for the first half of 2009. Obviously, Sun does not commit enough resources to this technology. During the presentation numerous examples were given how to use JSF in the right way. It clearly showed that a JSF developer has to care about too many technical details (e.g. life cycle) and compared to ULC the programming model is still way more complex. After the presentation I spoke with the senior architect of a large financial institution which is using JSF extensively and he was pretty miffed about the slow progress of JSF.
The Filthy Rich Client sequel by Romain Guy and Chet Haase was up next. This year’s motto was “Filthier, Richer, Clientier”. It is always fun to see what one can do with Swing and Java 2D and they showed off some really nice effects. However, as with any sequel it is stretching out thin. Almost everybody should now have realized that really stunning user interfaces can be accomplished with Swing and Java 2D and not only using AJAX or Flash/Flex. For an example see our souped-up demo application.
In the evening I attended “Taming the Leopard: Extending OS X the Java Technology Way”. Two guys from Oracle (supported by a member of the Apple Java team) demonstrated how to use Java for writing Mac OS X plugins. One plugin was for QuickLook which is Mac OS X’s way to render the contents of a file without starting an application. This can easily be done using Java rather than Objective C. The trick is to convert the contents of the file to HTML or SVG, both of which are natively supported for rendering on Mac OS X. Using a third party Java library they even rendered the contents of a Java file as a UML diagram. The second plugin was for Spotlight and enabled indexing the contents of jar and class files.
I really enjoyed the third day of JavaOne 2008 with the majority of the sessions informative and well presented – to the point what I expect from a technical conference.
