Editor's Daily Blog: JavaOne 2008: Day Three

In the middle of the JavaOne conference, the unifying elements like Tuesday's general sessions give way to the specifics of the many technical sessions, BoFs, and pavilion-floor presentations. We may be one big happy family of Java developers in the first keynote, but by this point, attendees have gone their many separate ways: REST, Blu-Ray, JavaFX, JRuby, etc. It's all Java, and shows the expanse of the Java platform, yet it's also different, knowing you're in a smaller room of like-minded people, people who are probably wrestling with the same APIs and tools you are.

Most of my time yesterday was spent at the java.net Community Corner (booth #101 on the pavilion floor), but I did make time to check out a Blu-Ray session, most of which focused on the open-source access to Blu-Ray afforded by the HD Cookbook project. You may have seen their posts on the front page over the last few months -- they're the most active of the ME forums -- but it's interesting to see the big picture of how far you can get with their open-source scene graph and tools. They tempted the demo gods by running their demo disc on a very slow, first-generation Pioneer Blu-Ray player and, despite some long load times (long enough to allow for a short lecture on object reuse and class-loading optimization), it worked. It's still a pursuit with a lot of rough edges -- getting a System.out.println() logged on the player is atypically painful -- but the packed room suggests there are plenty of developers ready to try.

The other big news is that our special VIP for the java.net booth's 4 PM Q&A was the creator of Java himself, James Gosling. He fielded wide-open questions from the audience, including what he would have done differently (closures from day one, no AWT... but then again, they had only five weeks to deliver the first version of Java to Netscape), what non-Java language on the JVM people should be using (Scala), what he does on java.net (he owns a number of projects, including the presentation application, Huckster), and more. We all really appreciated his taking the time to stop by and take questions from the community.

Up today, the final day of the java.net Community Corner, and the last chance to program your Trackbot to run through the maze in our booth. Do stop by and check us out.

On the java.net special JavaOne page today: