Unlike past years, I did not blog during JavaOne this year. I posted one entry the day before JavaOne started, providing a recap of NetBeans Day San Francisco. But other than that, I was silent. This was by design. I find that time spent blogging takes away from time spent going to sessions, socializing, and most importantly, sleeping.

This blog will serve as a substitute. It is a bit tardy in arriving because after I got back from JavaOne I came down with the flu. So I am just now getting back to full strength.

At last night's meeting of the Austin Java Users Group the topic was a recap of JavaOne. I talked about what I saw, along with three other members who attended: Rich Cohen, Rob Ratcliff, and Michael Yuan. So while this blog entry might be late in arriving, it has more content because I will try to describe some of the comments from Rich, Rob, and Michael.

Rob started things off with some excellent photos, videos, slides, and the demo from his JavaOne technical session, Designing Scalable High-Performance Rich Clients from the Trenches. I had attended Rob's session and the demo was pretty cool: synchronization of sensor data, plotted geographically (and in other ways as well) in a Swing application. Lots of non-trivial problems to solve to get all that to work correctly.

Rob said he mostly attended the Desktop talks and he seemed pleased with the quality of them. He and I talked about how much we both enjoyed Ben Galbraith's Debugging and Optimizing Swing Applications presentation. Rob also showed the JavaFX and World Wind demos. It had been several years since Rob had last been to a JavaOne and he commented on how much the crowd control has improved.

I was up next and in contrast to Rob I had no presentation slides, interesting pictures, or cool demos. Rob was kind enough to leave the World Wind demo up on the screen. For my money, World Wind was the coolest looking demo I saw at JavaOne this year. I spent most of my time, however, talking about JavaFX. In particular, JavaFX Script. To me, there are several pieces to watch for in order to gauge how much of an impact JavaFX Script will ultimately have:

• A compiler. Right now the language is interpreted. Luckily, there are some really smart people around Sun who know how to write compilers.


• The deployment piece. Creating an appealing application quickly is not helpful if the potential users cannot get the JRE running. Again, some smart people are working on this.


• The media piece. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily support playing movies within a Java (or JavaFX Script) application? Read more about this in an entry from Chet Haase.


• The tools. Right now there are plugins available, which is a good start. But in addition to improving those plugins, it seems like an entirely new set of tools is needed to compete against things like Adobe Illustrator.

Rich Cohen was up next and he described some of the talks he enjoyed the most. I recall he specifically mentioned the talk on Testing Concurent Software. Rich also commented on something that I noticed this year as well: the schedule was changed so that there was a break during lunch time. The last couple of years they scheduled technical sessions during the lunch hour and this year (thankfully) they did not.

Michael Yuan finished things up with a really good presentation whose central theme was: the big news from JavaOne 2007 was that there was no big news. He used as one of his data points the fact that most of the books on the top 10 list at the JavaOne book store were books that were available last year. I think he makes an excellent point. He admitted that JavaFX Script looked interesting, but that it is of no relevance to him (and by extension, to many other JavaOne attendees). This is a direct result of Michael's focus on Java EE, which in all fairness is where a lot of the work in the Java world is done today.

Michael's real passion is mobile devices, however, and his comment on JavaFX Mobile was very clear: "Thanks, but no thanks." His concern is the lack of handsets and he is skeptical that the major handset manufacturers will sign on to the idea.

There were quite a few questions and discussions with the audience. All three of the other presenters said nice things about NetBeans Day San Francisco, so I told the story of Bob Beasley and his Doggie Oral Reward Kit (D.O.R.K.) which was built in part with the NetBeans Visual Web Pack and a Sun SPOT.

One of the questions I was asked about JavaFX Script was: "What is the advantage of this over Flash?" to which I responded: "Easy access to the wide world of Java software out there." Another question was: "How does this compare to SVG?" to which I paraphrased a comment from Chris Oliver, the inventor of the JavaFX Script language: "I didn't like describing my user interface in XML."

So all in all, a fun evening. The photo below is of me, Michael, Rich, and Rob.