Opinions expressed in this post are totally my own and not necessarily that of my employer.

Wednesday started with the infamous “scriptbowl”, a competition between various scripting languages. This year the contenters were JRuby, Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. I wondered whether Scala considers itself a scripting language but obviously they either do or just seek the opportunity to be on stage.

To keep a long story short: Groovy has won this event for the third time in a row! This year the race was tied with Scala. Guillaume presented Groovy in the typical Groovy-idomatic style and explained every single line of his concurrent visual analyzer for Google+ postings. Dick Wall presented only non-idomatic Scala code. I interpret this as: to make Scala appealing you have to make it look like Groovy. Furthermore, he presented Kojo, which is a great interactive learning environment written in Play/Scala. In contrast to all other presentations, this was not specifically created for the scriptbowl, nor was it written by the presenter, nor was it clear how much effort went into it, nor did the audience see a single line the implementation code. How much this skewed the comparison, I leave to everybody’s judgement. The show was good, though.

I felt a bit sorry for Clojure. It is a great language and deserves a presentation that is more visually appealing to convince the crowd.

Afterwards, I attended a hands-on lab for “rapid enterprise development with netbeans”, which was essentially creating a Swing app for database CRUD actions. If I remember correctly, I did the exact same task 1997 with JBuilder. It left me with the feeling of “Yes, it works” but it is not less complex than it was 13 years ago.

Early afternoon Gerrit Grunwald (better known as @hansolo_) presented his work on simplified custom components for Swing. Given that he speaks about an activity that is both utterly important and highly underadvertised he would really deserve speaking at the center stage.

Graeme Rocher’s great session about Grails, polyglot datastores (hibernate, jpa, redis, mongodb, …), and the cloud was overshadowed by the news that Steve Jobs has died. Accidentally, the demo application was about showing a BBC News stream, which displayed this information live on stage. Both the presenter and the audience were equally touched.

The day officially ended with a big event at treasure island. I decided to not go there, though, and meet the former Canooey Denis Antonioli in Berkely where we had a great evening.

Dierk Koenig

The technical keynote started with a weird JavaZone-style video featuring a Java programmer as a rapper. It was certainly intended to be funny but as far as I can tell, it didn’t catch on.

The keynote was packed but the somehow reduced ballroom layout added to this impression. Attendance was said to be twice that of last year (so probably around 10’000). Even though there are certainly more people than last year, a doubled number seems a bit exaggerated to me. Throughout the day, all talks were well attended, though, but nothing like in the days when JavaOne had 10’000 attendees in Moscone Center.

The technical content was not surprising, beside that Oracle now advertises its NoSQL solution, which is based on the former Berkeley DB. As expected JavaFX 2.0 GA has been announced along with the respective tooling and covered by 50 (!) talks on JavaFX at JavaOne. The JavaFX presentation started very conventionally but in the end showed some really cool lab projects with a dancing duke steered by gesture recognition.

The best presenter was Mark Reinhold on Java 7/8/9. Good style, nice slides, perfect pace, interesting (but not really surprising) content. New to me was project Nashorn: new JavaScript implementation for the JVM expected for Java 8. Project Lambda is planned to contain “defender methods”, default implementations for interface methods. That sounds like traits and actually I expect some issues when doing this in Java.

Overall, the keynote was missing the JavaOne “feeling” from the olden Sun times. There was no host that led through the event, welcomed the attendees, and encouraged everybody to network. No big names on stage, no overwhelming achievements. The crowd left the room unexcited.

For the rest of the day I was mainly concerned with preparing and delivering my own talks on “Extending Java’s reach with Groovy” and “Pro Groovy”. They were well attended and received.

Andres delivered his Griffon talk in parallel.

Afterwards, I was a tired but still listened to Charles Nutter on JVM bytecode, Dan Sline on Griffon, and Jim Discroll on Groovy DSLs. Quote to take away: “Oracle ADFm makes heavy use of Groovy!”

That’s it for today.

This is gonna be a short series about my impressions of JavaOne 2011.

As always, it is nice to see the town decorated for the event, even though Oracle World gets certainly much higher attention. So the immigration officer as well as the nice guy sitting next to me on a bench at Union Square ask “ah – you are a programmer? Are you here for Oracle World?” “Hmpf…”

Should you ask yourself “what’s in for me”? Here is a first answer: the conference material

The bag is not very practical for a software developer. I guess the selection has been taken by an Oracle employee who assumes that their conference attendees never carry any material themselves in the first place (which may be true for OracleWorld). The jacket is very nice, though.

And, yes, you can rate conference organizers by the badges they produce. Hey, that should not be too difficult, right? Here is what you still can make wrong:

• Printing the delegate’s name so small that it is hardly readable from more than 20 cm away. Now since the badge usually hangs at belly height (if not lower) this can be a bit embarrassing for both involved parties.
• Second, the name belongs on both sides of the badge! Really! How often did you try to read the name only finding that the badge hangs the wrong way around?

Otherwise, the waiting time was not too long. The speakers registration was actually empty when I arrived. The attendees registration was pretty well filled, though. But then everybody has to go to the material pickup which was for me in Moscone West 3rd floor where I waited in line for about 20 minutes and I was very early and the queue grew much longer afterwards.

This made me think about my latest work on highly concurrent producer-consumer scenarios (http://people.canoo.com/mittie/kanbanflow.html) and what it would need to improve the situation.

Otherwise, from studying the program schedule, I found that Oracle has wisely chosen to pretty much always put two Groovy-related talks in parallel as if to make sure that nobody can escape the Groovy (\G) in these time-slots.

I’m eager to see what the week will bring.

Dierk Koenig, @mittie

JavaOne 2010 is already history and allow me to make some final remarks. This years’s JavaOne marks the biggest change this conference has ever seen. Replacing the familiar Sun logo by the Oracle logo (well almost – the Audi TT in the Java Frontier demo session still had a Sun sticker on it) was just the least of changes. Java now seems to be just one technology in Oracle’s portfolio and not the pivotal technology as with Sun. It was a pretty sobering experience how the Java community pales next to the Oracle Develop conference. And the fact that the JavaOne sessions were “banned” from the Moscone center where the Oracle Develop conference took place emphasized this even more. Granted, it is far from easy to keep the enthusiasm rolling with a technology that is more than 15 years old. Sun did a far better job on this in the previous years, though.

Whereas the sales part was fairly bad the content is still top-notch. I enjoyed quite many good technical sessions even with the conference venue being a drag (most rooms were not really suited to host a conference session). Spreading the conference across three hotels around Union Square had only one advantage: sessions were only one hour long since people took much longer to move to the next session and hence, speakers were forced to focus more. I also missed the JavaOne slide templates. Sun used to keep a pretty tight leash on how slides looked like. This year, most slides were just alphabet soups.

The major topics of this year’s JavaOne were JavaFX on the client side (despite JavaFX Script’s demise) and the cloud and REST on the server side. I keep wondering whether JavaFX will really conquer the desktop, though. This will be a tough uphill battle, but Oracle tends to be more persistent (or stubborn) than Sun used to be. Having deep pockets certainly helps with this. The prominent absentees were portlets, Java ME, and Google. I haven’t seen a single session about portlets in the conference guide. For Java ME, they offered quite some sessions, but it got barely covered in the keynotes. The mobile world now turns around iOS and Android, JavaME seems to have fallen by the wayside. Last but not least, Google withdrew from the conference at short notice due to the legal battle started by Oracle. I certainly missed them because the Google sessions were always among the best technical sessions at JavaOne.

It was also interesting to see what kind of devices the attendees were using. iPads seem to be very popular with Java developers (despite the fact that the iPad does not run Java!).

My bottom line is that Java as a technology is well entrenched in the developer world and here to stay. I am not so sure about JavaOne. Oracle has quite some homework to do in this area.