JavaOne Tuesday Afternoon General Session - Java Technology

Well, there was a lot of interesting stuff at this session.

One thing great to see was the ability to run Rails apps on Glassfish, and being able to build and deploy this straight from NetBeans. Great demo from Tor Norbye and Charlie Nutter showing how to take advantage of Java in a Ruby app, code completion, instant rename of variables, and so on. I do have to learn this Ruby stuff soon. So much to learn, so little time.

Danny Coward talked about the future of Java SE 7. The two areas that were very interesting to me is the work on modularization support and the focus on enabling Java on the Internet client.

The planned work for Java SE 7 includes "superpackages" and "super jars". Super packages will allow you to give much finer grain control of what a package exposes and to whom. Super jars is an upgrade of jar files to allow for really using jars for application and module packaging. This includes versioning, defining dependencies, and to make sure the module system is interoperable with existing frameworks such as OSGi.

Something I have been wanting to see for a while appears to be planned for Java SE 7, and that's to spend some focused time for Java on the Internet client. This includes defining a "Java kernel" which is the base VM required to run Java, and then the rest is downloaded "in parallel" (I'm not sure what that means, but I think it sounds good). As someone who has worked on applets and seen the cost of downloads, this is very exciting.

There was also a demo of Glassfish v3, which has gone fully modular. What this means is there is a tiny kernel that is sufficient to serve static HTML, which starts up in 463ms (wow!). Then, when you deploy an app, be it Ruby, Phobos, or a standard Java app, Glassfish figures out what you need, and then loads the appropriate code. Very nice!

Bob then surprised me by dropping my name about the blogging I have done around running Java DB in an Internet desktop, and said that with Glassfish v3 you can now have an app server small enough to deploy to the desktop as well, which truly enables a fully offline application. I need to look into this more, and I'll get back to you with my take on this.

NASA World Wind - Wow, this was amazing!. An open source, 100% Java geospatial package. This is Google Earth that you can embed and "mash up" within your Java application using standard Swing programming. I love this because it is opening up the geospatial platform and making it available to everyone, without it being owned by a single company like Google or Microsoft. Definitely you need to check this out!

There was also a great demo of Project IRIS. A very nice demo showing the power of Java on the desktop. The 3-d browsing was beautiful, you can go full screen, and you can drag-and-drop photos directly from the desktop.

What was very interesting was that it was a lot of work to build this with HTML and CSS. Chris Oliver, the inventor of Java FX Script, was able to rewrite this in Java FX Script in 3 days. Wow.

There was an in-depth demo of how Java FX Script worked, but I couldn't see the code where I was sitting and it was just a bit too much to take in in this format. I need to sit down and read this stuff, and you should too.

Someone sitting next to me asked what I think will be a very common question - how does this compare to Flash? Having never used Flash, I didn't have an answer to this, but I'm sure there will be lots of blogs and articles trying to answer this specific question.