Removing my home directory, JavaOne, and Minority Report

Well, it was a long night for me last night. I couldn't believe what I did. I thought I was removing the database directory on my machine but instead I blew away my entire home directory! Luckily I had it backed up, but I had to redo all my changes for the demo I'm doing tomorrow in my talk and was up until midnight. Then my daughter, bless her heart, was up like clockwork at 6am saying “read to me Daddy, read to me!”

The demo is working great, running at our pod, and we'll see how it does at this afternoon's session on Apache Derby (5:45, Hall E134, for those of you who are here at JavaOne). I had planned to do this demo on my laptop, but I had also published it to my web site at my ISP. When I went to my technical rehearsal this afternoon, I saw a nice Solaris workstation sitting there with Internet access, and I realized I just had to type in my URL and there it was. I could then copy my database to my USB stick and hand it to Dan, totally seamless. Sometimes as an engineer you forget what you're building – hey, this is a web app!

Losing my entire home directory and recovering from backup reminded me of the value of backups and durability. I am demoing how you can take the database stored on your local machine (through a browser-based app that embeds Derby) and move it to another device (e.g a USB stick). I was demonstrating this for mobility of your data, but it's also a very nice quick way to do a database backup.

It was great to hear about Sun's plans to open source Java (“not if but how” is the famous phrase). I also was quite impressed by the demonstration of building BPEL business process in NetBeans and the ability to build and navigate complex XML schemas. It looks like more and more contributions and collaborations are going into NetBeans. I've been using NetBeans over the past year, since I started working on Derby, and I continue to be impressed with it. I'm glad to see the kind of support it's getting, for selfish reasons: it means the tool I develop with will continue to improve. I remember in the early days of Java, the only tools usable at all were expensive and proprietary; I was resigned to “vi” and “System.out.println.” Now I have a completely free tool that is fast, helpful, and significantly outdistances the old proprietary tools. What a great change.

A last note, about an amazingly cool thing I saw on the floor show today. I don't know if you saw Minority Report, with Mr. Tom Cruise navigating through a windowing system by standing in front of it and making gestures with his arms. Well, I actually saw this in action today at the GoMonkey booth. I didn't know such a thing existed. They use the Project Looking Glass 3D windowing system from Sun and have it running on a full screen projector with two cameras and two Sun x64 workstations. It was astonishing. I can't imagine having one of these in my living room, but it doesn't matter, it's way cool.