Gregg Sporar's Blog

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.

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