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Hans Muller's Blog
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Intersperse Savage RaidPosted by hansmuller on June 13, 2003 at 09:47 AM | Comments (2)I finally got a chance to wander around the JavaOne "Pavilion" trade show floor. If you trot out to the edges, you'll see that the Pavilion is flanked by huge arrays of tables covered by white table cloths and little isolated clots of laptops and sandwiches attended by glassy eyed hackers trying not to give in to jet lag. I like to start out at the edges because that's where the new companies are. In years gone by the edge was where the crazy ideas were, it was where the hackers who hadn't slept all week were, it was where the guys who wanted to get to the show floor interior started out. This year felt a little different. The edges of the show floor seemed to fade into the sea of lunch tables a little more suddenly than in years gone by. Not to be denied the inspiring sight of some new Java desktop apps, I pulled on some mobile phone exhibit hip waders and headed back into the show floor interior. I only had an hour to check things out. I wasn't disappointed. The Apple booth was impossible to miss with all the bright light glinting off the beautiful lexan cases and those gorgeous gigantic flat screen displays. There were big black racks of new Apple servers doing sentry duty at the booth's corners. The servers were looking very stylish with hip little rows of blue blinky lights. The lights were very very bright. In a pinch they could be used for Lasik. Allen Denison, who's the Product Manager for OS X showed off a nice looking Swing app for adminstering RAID's called (this is pretty clever) "RAID Admin". There are some screenshots here. What's great about this Apple desktop app is that sys admins can also run it on other platforms, if they happen to be adminstering their systems from a lesser desktop. Intersperse was showing a great looking JMX management console at their booth. A couple of months ago I ran into an engineer who claimed to be building a similar product and he told me that his JMX console was going to just target browsers. He thundered about HTML being "good enough" for building user interfaces as he scratched udpates to his todo list on a clay tablet. I would have loved to have shown him this product. Great looking Swing GUIs with lots of custom controls for displaying status and doing analysis in real time. I also dropped by the VisiComp booth. VisiComp's "RetroVue" debugger was featured in a James Gosling JavaOne keynote a year or two ago. The debugger instruments class files so that all significant events, like method entry and exit, are timestamped and logged in a journal file. That done, you can debug backwards and forwards in time. In years gone by, the journal file for a big app might have been hopelessly large. Thanks to today's plentiful supply of big cheap disks, you can journal all you want. The RetroVue Swing GUI is looking better than ever however you'll want to get one of those really big Apple flat screen displays so that you can see everything at once. Last stop before I had to dart out was the SavaJe booth. Last year SavaJe was showing iPAQ PDAs and other small devices running the complete J2SE stack. Web Started Swing apps like ThinkFree Office running on a device that you could toss to someone across a room! This year the SavaJe booth was inhabited by a herd of cell phones running more web started apps including email, chat, and a very impressive video player (Star Wars!). And you can make phone calls too. It's great to see how far mobile phone computing has come and the high res 16 bit color screen looked great. Inside these phones was an 300+ Mhz XScale CPU, 32-64M or RAM, and a SAN slot for a Flash card. Thanks to the market for high resolution cameras embedded in phones, we're looking at hand held devices with CPU, RAM, and even secondary storage capacity that's comparable to PCs from a few years ago. Run Anywhere. Bookmark blog post:  del.icio.us  Digg  DZone  Furl  Reddit
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