This will be quick.

The opening keynote was from Oracle. Thomas Kurian, along with several of his employees who did demos. All in all reasonably impressive. But I could not help but notice that the first demo was done with Eclipse and the subsequent demos were done with JDeveloper. The first demo involved creating entities from a database for a Java EE 5 application. All very similar to what we are showing with version 5.5 of the NetBeans IDE. The JDeveloper demos were for the flashier stuff: SOA and Ajax-ification of the web application.

Why two tools? I went over to the Oracle booth to ask that question and the best I could make out from the answer was that Oracle recommends JDeveloper (no surprise). The specific quote was: "You'll always be able to do everything in JDeveloper that you can do in Eclipse." But the reverse is not necessarily going to be true. Oracle is donating some EE 5 tools to Eclipse, but the really cool stuff (SOA, etc.) is apparently being developed for JDeveloper only.

I also saw some good sessions today. Josh Bloch had originally planned to have an updated Effective Java by now, but it is taking longer than anticipated. But his "Effective Java Reloaded" session was still worthwhile - some patterns to use that take advantage of features in JDK5, in particular generics.

I saw half of a session on JAX-WS and a couple of BOFs. The first BOF was by Jim Weaver and Anurag Pareek of BEA Systems. They work as "fly and fix" engineers for BEA. Which means when a customer escalates a problem they fly to the site and fix it. Their topic was fixing memory leaks in constrained environments. They did a good job, although I would have preferred more demos and fewer slides. They took a different approach to this topic than what I am planning to do on Thursday night with my BOF: Memory Leaks in Javaâ„¢ Technology-Based Applications: Different Tools for Different Types of Leaks. I invited them to my BOF and they said they would attend, so I am looking forward to their feedback.

The other BOF was "Creating NetBeans Plug-ins for Integration With JavaServerâ„¢ Faces, Hibernate, Spring, and EJBâ„¢ 3.0 Technology" by Alexandre Gomes and Edgar A Silva. This is an interesting piece of work. They have created a code generator called Greenbox which is delivered as a plug-in module for the NetBeans IDE.

The highlight of the day though was "Creating Professional Swing UIs Using NetBeansâ„¢ GUI Builder (Formerly Code-Named "Matisse")." This was done by Tomas Pavek, Jan Stola, and Scott Violet. It was obvious they put some time into preparing for it. They showed off some of the features that will be released very soon in an update. My favorite was the ability to do automatic internationalization. You type into the form just like today and it looks like you're typing a string literal, but behind the scenes the GUI builder is using .properties files.