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.

The second day was really busy for me and therefore I could only attend a single session, namely “Closures Cookbook” by Neil Gafter. He is a really good presenter (often performing together with Josh Bloch) and I enjoyed the session. Most of it revolved around timing an operation and how to accomplish this in Java using closures. This was a great example for demonstrating the purpose of closures (reducing lots of boilerplate code) and also how complex closures can become when returning values or dealing with exceptions. I am still not a big fan of the closure syntax and I continue to keep fond memories of how elegant the Smalltalk syntax was.
Last year the conference was buzzing with everything about AJAX. This year it looks to me that this has cooled off quite a bit. On the one hand AJAX is now somehow established, on the other hand people realized that AJAX only addresses some of the user interface challenges of Web applications. We had a considerable number of visitors at our booth who complained about AJAX and they are looking for alternatives. This primarily holds true for business applications and is also started to get noticed by analysts, e.g. Forrester.

Fun and great feedback following Mike and Dierk’s talk at JavaOne; Sun asks for a repeat performance!

As previously announced, Dierk and I held a talk at JavaOne today (actually Dierk held no less than TWO talks – there’s just no stopping this guy!) The title of our over-subscribed session was “Going Mobile with JavaFX Script Technology, Groovy and Google Android” and in addition to an eager and informed public, we were honoured to have some of JavaFX’s and Android’s champions and contributors in the audience.

We took the first few moments of the session to emphasize one of Canoo’s core value propositions: The discernment of hyperbole from reality. Indeed, much of my part of the talk concerned the current
status of JavaFX Script (scheduled official release in June 08) and how it does not (yet) live up to many of the claims being made about it.

Unsurprisingly, our statements concerning the immature status of functionality and tooling in JFX were not met with silence. And in a delightfully spontaneous moment at the end of the talk we invited
James Weaver to join us on stage for what amounted to a mini panel session.

James’ main point was that JFX makes rich client development significantly easier than, say, with Swing, and that this can only be good for the Java platform. Of course, we don’t disagree with this
statement. But where differences in opinion remain is (a) in the use of the word “significantly”; and (b) in our level of confidence regarding whether or not JavaFX Script will succeed in a market, where
competition is tough, well-established, and only getting tougher by the week. JFX’s current deficiencies (which we talked about in some detail) of course only reduce its chances of success.

So what’s our primary take-home based on the feedback we got directly after the talk and at the Canoo booth? That a level-headed and unbiased opinion on a given technology is what the majority of
conference attendees are looking for. And who are these attendees? Quite simply: Real people representing real companies who serve real customers, who nevertheless enjoy being inspired by examples from the cutting edge, such as our MusicPinboard JavaFX and Mobile Shopping Android applications.

Finally, to top off all the great feedback, Sun asked us to repeat the session this coming Friday!!! So if you didn’t catch us the first time around, we’d be thrilled to see you in hall 302 of the Moscone Center at 13:30.

Thanks to everyone who did attend for coming and for the positive feedback!

A conference typically starts off with a keynote and JavaOne is no different. This is Sun’s biggest opportunity to brainwash its Java faithfuls, realign them and get them excited about the latest innovations Sun would like to take off. So if you expect any relevant technical information then this is the wrong session to attend, because this is all about marketing and hyping. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see what hype might be coming next. Whether this will make into a product you can bet your business on is a completely different story.
John Gage was the host, as usual, but Rich Green, James Gosling, and Jonathan Schwartz got most of the airtime.
Most exciting from Canoo’s point of view was RIA being one if not the topic of the keynote. Finally, Sun has realized that plain ugly web applications are not good enough anymore. Their solution to this challenge is JavaFX which was introduced at last year’s keynote, but, frankly spoken, has not seen much progress in the last year. This year Sun expects JavaFX to be the centerpiece for a unified Rich Internet Experience both on the desktop and on mobile devices (and even Blu-Ray players). One demo showed how a JavaFX application running in the browser can be dragged to the desktop and continues to run there even after closing the browser. I was most surprised by the announcement that JavaFX will run on top of Android. Looks like Sun is trying to embrace this renegade platform rather then suing them.
In addition, Sun intends to heat up the desktop competition by making Java SE slimmer and slicker. Java is now also included with Ubuntu and RedHat by default and other Linux distributions are to follow soon. The guest star of this year’s keynote was Neil Young who praised Java for helping him to realize the documentation of his musical career to be released on Blu Ray. The demo of which was really impressive, and by the way one of the few demos that worked (the demo gods were not really benevolent). The bottom line of the keynote was that Sun is trying to get back to the desktop, the server-side of Java was hardly a topic. On another note I had the feeling that the attendance numbers keep decreasing. There also seem to be less exhibitors than last year. Probably also a sign of the weakening economy.
On the first day I attended two sessions. Josh Bloch is one of my favourite speakers and therefore I could not miss his talk on “More Effective Java”. I was not disappointed. He presented a few chapters (esp. enums and lazy initialization) from the second edition of his “Effective Java” book and it is always fun to learn about the intricacies of the Java language. If you ever have a chance to listen to Josh Bloch, don’t miss it!
The second talk was about GUI testing using the FEST library. Just a few weeks ago I read a paper written by Alex Ruiz who is the lead developer of this library. I was pretty much convinced by the concepts, the implementation and esp. the nice Domain Specific Language for developing programmatic tests for Swing user interfaces. The presenters, however, were not as convincing, but my judgement might be unfair having just attended Josh Bloch’s session before. One interesting piece of information was that when asked most attendees prefered programmatic GUI testing over play-record GUI testing.

Here’s a quick note from JavaOne 2008:

We had a busy day at the booth yesterday. Greg Hutchinson, Principle Developer at Farm Credit Canada showed a demo of their UltraLightClient application that was very well received. If you’re attending JavaOne: He’s coming again today. If you’re interested, come over to booth 429 at around 1:30 pm.

Canoo sample application Music Pinboard was mentioned in one of the JavaFX sessions (and attributed to Canoo as well!)

Canoo Sessions
Dierk and Mike are speaking today. Dierk’s WebTest talk, which was listed as an alternative talk, is taking place at 13:30, right after the “Going Mobile” talk at 10:50.