JavaOne 2008 Recap: Houston

Jim Bethancourt , president of the Houston Java Users Group (HJUG) invited me to sit on a panel at their May meeting to discuss JavaOne 2008.

It was a good dicussion. The other panelists were James Velasco, Steven Reynolds, and Dan Sline. Dan started things off with a discussion of some proposed changes: closures, annotations for fields, etc.

I then did some demos. I did the BTrace, GChisto, and VisualVM demos that Jarda and I did during our technical session. The coolest demo I did, though, was Ken Russell's applet plugin demo. I dragged an applet out of the browser onto the desktop, closed the browser, and the applet kept running.

After that, Steven took over and talked about some of his favorite sessions, which included Gavin King's session on Web Beans and Mikael Grev's session on the MiG layout manager.

James wrapped things up with a neat approach: a JavaOne "index" that showed which trends were on their way up, and which were on their way down. Among those on the way up: NetBeans and JavaFX. Among those on their way down: SOAP-based web services.

Slides from the presenters are available here. A photo of the speakers is below. James and Dan are in front, that's Steven and me in the back row.