Hans Muller's Blog: JavaOne Archives

Dublin Ireland time is eight hours ahead of PST back in Silicon Valley however I've mostly overcome the jet lag. Except from 1-2 PM every day when I feel like a narcoleptic. It's 1:30 right now and it feels like my brain is draped with a big hot wet wool blanket.

That was as far as this blog got on Tuesday. After failing to find a way to make both eyes focus on the screen at the same time, I stumbled out of the computer room to find strong coffee.

The computer room was the conference's social hub. As rooms go it wasn't terribly impressive: a big windowless room filled with folding tables surrounded by chairs, plenty of outlets on the floor, and a broadband ethernet cable duct taped to the table in front of each chair. It's hard to explain how inviting your own little space at the internet trough can look after you've been offline for a few days. The computer room was a magnet for the folks attending the conference. It was jammed all day with GNOME developers who were yacking and hacking and enjoying the camaraderie. It was here that I discovered some things about the conference and the GNOME community:

They're friendly, they like to talk, and they really like to talk about the software. I'm shy and hopeless at making conversation however I found myself talking to all kinds of people about what they were building, what they planned to build, and (typically for me) about how Java might fit in.
There's no point in finishing your GUADEC presentation before arriving at the conference. That's something that can be taken care of in the hours before you're scheduled to perform. Preferably in the terminal room, where you can procrastinate further by talking to me.
Hacking on big systems that you're passionate about is fun, and both qualities are contagious.
There's a clear hierachy among the developers. There are high priests, there are groups of trusted lieutenants, and there is the rabble. As a member of the rabble, I appreciated the fact that ones relative position in the hierarchy didn't seem to have any effect on the hobnobbing. Everyone made time to talk with everyone else.

Last week I spent the entire week at JavaOne and had a great time of it. One consistent theme that JavaOne attendees have fed back to the conference committee is that they want more technical content in the sessions. They want to see source code. This week I was at the conference (GUADEC) where code was king. The technical sessions were filled with developers hacking away at their laptops while the speaker talked about code and in some cases actually wrote code while everyone watched. Raptly. In one session the speaker ran a new (JIT) compiler on a small app and everyone watched attentively for several minutes while the instructions the compiler generated scrolled by in blur on the screen.

These are my people.

One of the most memorable keynote presentations of the week was given by Alan Kay, who appeared via a video link from his home in California. The average age of the GNOME developers I met at GUADEC was probably mid 20s and I felt very old, although not as old as Alan Kay. Alan's presentation began with an inspiring review of projects he'd worked on (or witnessed) back in the 1960s, including some great video of those old apps in action.

Ivan Sutherland's early 1960s "SketchPad" drawing application, which featured the first use of multiple windows (SketchPad3), still looks great. Users draw directly on the screen with a stylus and the app recognizes crudely drawn simple shapes and redraws them as perfect rectangles or semi-circles or rectangular polygons. Alan pointed out that this was the first object oriented system - a user could create classes of graphic objects, editing the class changed existing instances.

There was also a 1966 video of Doug Engelbart using a combination mouse/keyboard system to navigate around a little information tree. Response time was excellent even though the app was running on a 1/2 MIP time sharing system with 192KBytes of memory. Engelbart's goal was (is): "augmenting the collective IQ of groups of people". Still seems like a worthwhile goal.

These projects and more like them were intended to inspire everyone to build new apps that were atleast as capable as the ones built 40 years ago. Ofcourse there was an implicit dig in the call to action - we've lost the ability to craft small responsive apps even though we're now working with hardware that has 1000 times the capacity of what our forefathers had to work with. In other words, why does it take so much more code and computer horsepower to build high performance interactive data visualization apps then it used to? There are a variety of tired responses to such questions, some cynical, others self deprecating. The one that's not trotted out very often is the punchline to an old Bill Gates joke - "that was the demo". Great demos are a combination of technology and theater that deliver a little shot of adrenaline to the viewers imagination. The 1960s era demos we saw were certainly masterpieces, however they were still only demos. The difficulty of turning the vision those demos inspired into apps suitable for everyday use by everyone should not be underestimated. Hollywood had us traveling to the moon in the movies 40 years before anyone set foot there.

Bulding practical useful systems that deliver on the implicit promises in great demos is hard and it's time consuming. The GNOME community has done as much for Linux desktop computing and I can say from personal experience that it works like a champ.

Intersperse Savage Raid

Posted by hansmuller on June 13, 2003 at 09:47 AM | Permalink | 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.

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