Cay Horstmann's Blog

Java One Day 0

Last year, Java One Day 0 was Netbeans Day, in a cozy hotel. This year, the Java One week started much more grandly, with Community One, at the Moscone Center. There were tracks for a number of open source communities, including NetBeans, GlassFish, MySQL, OpenSolaris. Frankly, I preferred the cozy hotel, but I can see that it is savvy marketing by Sun to have a large-scale free community event.

Ian Murdoch (the ian in Debian) gave the keynote speech. My mind wanders in keynotes, and here were some of its destinations.

• His boss, Jonathan Schwartz, likens open source to the thousand tributaries giving rise to the mighty Amazon river (not the shopkeeper, although that too might be a valid analogy)—the reverse of this image.
• Maybe the MySQL acquisition makes more sense than I thought. As a card-carrying member of the chablis and brie set, I had always preferred PostgreSQL, but MySQL is a blue-collar database, just like Java is a blue-collar language.
• Core + edge. There is an open-source core (Java, OpenSolaris, etc.), and vendors add value at the edge. I thought of Donald Knuth and TeX, and how he insisted (wisely, I think) that it be the immutable core, whatever its flaws. Maybe that's what will happen with Java, and innovation will come at the edges, with new languages and technologies.
• This doesn't work so well with a closed-source core. Amen. At my university, we use the wretched Blackboard software that is sold to CIOs, not users. Over the weekend, I googled to find out how to import quiz questions to Blackboard. I got a zillion hits on how to do this for Moodle, an open-source alternative, in a variety of formats. With Blackboard, there is a solitary third party product for the job that uses Windows. Too bad I don't.
• One problem with the OLPC is that the coders aren't it's users. Amen.
• Open source lets you be brilliant faster. Amen.

Charles Nutter gave an interesting overview of languages that run on the JVM. There were the usual suspects: Groovy, Jython, JRuby, Rhino, Scala, and some more exotic ones. (Note to self: Check out Clojure and see if it makes software transactional memory easier to understand.) Charles' advice: The era of doing everything in a single language is over. Be a polyglot.

Sadly, the Netbeans talks were far from riveting. Instead, I walked off to the exhibit area and had a chat with Winston Prakash and a very friendly fellow from the Prague office about the JSF visual designer. The Netbeans 6.1 editor isn't bad, provided you don't use absolute positioning and ignore the useless backing bean that it insists on generating. But it could be so much better. An improved visual editor is being planned, but apparently JSR 276 is going nowhere. That's too bad. Wouldn't it be nice if you could use your favorite JSF library (ICEfaces, RichFaces, ADF Faces/Trinidad, Woodstock) in your favorite IDE, with visual builder support? It has taken far longer than I expected for these components to appear, but now that they are there, I want to drag and drop them, and not be stuck with the drab standard components. (Check out this blog by my graduate student Ashlesha Patil...)

There was a very nice presentation on EclipseLink. It looks like a great JPA provider, blazing the trail to JPA 2.0 and offering amazing configurability. But it surely takes the prize for the most confusingly named product of the day. Recall that Toplink WateredDown, erm, Essentials, is the JPA provider in GlassFish. The original Toplink is now open-sourced with the Eclipse foundation, hence the name. Where can you find it? In Glassfish 3, which you can install into NetBeans (!). The Eclipse IDE has not yet caught up.

My favorite event was a fun presentation about using robots in computer science education. These aren't your usual Lego robots. They have several processors on board for “cockroach reflexes”, and they can be equipped with a Java-powered SunSpot for its brains. The presenters demoed a nifty development environment based on Greenfoot. You can prototype your robot in the safety of your laptop, and then download the program into the SunSpot to control the actual hardware. There is a maze-solving contest going on at Java One. If you have any brain cycles left for coding at Java One, give it a try!

Comments

• If you ever do need a good Virtual Learning Environment and can bear to work with something based on PHP then Moodle really is very, very good.
  I have worked with Blackboard and Moodle and I find Moodle to be much nicer (its GPL too). Thanks for Core JSF by the way.

  Posted by: marcusavgreen on May 06, 2008 at 07:08 AM

• Last year's (2007) NetBeans day was part of the CommunityOne event

  Posted by: luano on May 06, 2008 at 11:20 AM

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