JavaOne, Final Thoughts

Closing Day Keynote

This was the Scott McNealy and James Gosling show. And I think even people
who hate Sun (and there are people who feel that way) would agree that it
was pretty entertaining. A full recap is here.
Scott made jokes about how his life has
improved now that he is no longer the CEO. Then James came up on stage
and showed a tribute movie that recapped Scott's career at Sun.

After that, James started his presentation, which he described as "short on
slides, this is mostly a toy show." First up was Tom Ball
with a
demo of Jackpot.
The demo he did used
the source code of javac, which he searched for unnecessarily complex
boolean expressions.

After that the mode switched to mobility. Martin Brehovsky and Petr
Suchomel did a cool demo with two mobile applications: one that ran
on an embedded board that included an RFID reader. The application on it
was sending information to a web server that was running somewhere else (maybe
in Prague?). That web server was in turn pushing out updates to
an application that was running on a cell phone. So when a package arrived
with an RFID tag on it the cell phone would display a "your package
has arrived" message. From end to end, the system was all Java.
The second mobility demo showed off a JSR-209 enabled phone, which
means it has the ability to run Swing applications, among other things.

The theme then switched to real time stuff. Greg Bollella
came up and
did a demo of a real time version of the Sun Java System Application
Server. It was intriguing. But it was not as much fun as the slot
car race. The top three finishers were brought up on stage for one
final race. There was a glitch at first, as Ruth Kusterer
describes
here. But eventually everything worked well and each team got a framed
certificate.

The closing act was Tommmy, An unmanned Autonomous Java Powered Dune Buggy.
The most interesting part of it was how relatively unsophisticated it was.
As James put it, "It looks like most of the parts came from Home Depot."

So What Happened?

The dominant theme this year was Java EE 5. It has been discussed at the previous two
JavaOne conferences, but this year it is finally real. There are tools and
runtimes that support it. Within that topic, Ajax was clearly the most
talked about item. The most interesting conversation I had about Ajax
was (as usual) unplanned. At lunch on the final day I started up a conversation with
Marc Boudreault of Sungard and Jésus Casillas Pellat of Sigma Tao.
Jésus pointed out that the abstraction level for EJBs is
finally correct with EJB 3.0. Ajax, on the other hand, is not there yet.
This is a direct quote: "Ajax is about where EJB was when it was at version 2.1."
That sentence really resonated with me, proving once again that
sometimes, reality bites.

Beyond Java EE 5 I was struck by the examples of real time Java. From Sun
SPOTs to Tommy, it seemed like real time stuff
was everywhere. With all the talk over the years about how "Java is
interpreted, it's too slow, you can't do pointer arithmetic, etc." it
was interesting to see Java being used to directly control hardware.