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Blu-Ray Q&A Brain Dump

I'll have an opinionated blog later, but here's my notes from the Blu-Ray Q&A BOF. Missing is my question/comment at the end, which I'll blog later.

Talk to the Stars: A Discussion of Blu-Ray Java Technology

• Phil Starner, Javelin Software (blond, glasses)
• Mike Zink, Technicolor (red shirt, black jacket)
• Kyle Prestinbock, Disney
• Bill Foote, Sun (session lead)

[note to self: remember comments about compatibility problems from morning keynote]

First question: there's a real discrepency between timeline tool based thinking (Final Cut, Flash) versus programming (Java). Zink: for 70-80% of these titles, something timeline-based would be plenty.

Bill: Sun's future plans in this space. Did everyone see JavaFX thing in the keynote? It's a scripting environment that is intellectually rigorous. Predicts dooms of ECMAScript and personal-basis Java. Claims ScriptFX will solve the same problems as Flash, but speaks to a low-level spec that can be standardized and "gotten right". By comparison, HD-DVD builds all their effects into the low level, so if they miss something good, they can't add it back later. BD-J puts runtime on the disc, so it can be fixed later. Bill tells Kyle that having Java developers developing titles is crazy; need to get designers into the loop.

Bill: we expect tools to be created. Once those are out there, we can set up authors/designers with those tools. BD-J as a whole is much larger than that. With DVD, we ran out of new innovative things to do after about three years.

Audience member: BD-J doesn't exist in a vacuum. Consumers are blaming BD-J complexity for lack of titles. Yes, you're future proofing, but we've got a timeline here, and Blu-Ray needs to get its act together. Sun is saying "we've got JavaFX", but Sun can't just throw a switch and suddenly everything's fine.

Audience member 2: OK, how do I learn BD-J now if I don't work at a studio that has paid the license. I want to just download some Eclipse plugins.

Mike: What we're doing in large scale production is different from what a developer would do at home. We use authoring tools to do the multiplexing, Java's just an application on top that does the underlying interactivity. Blu-Print, Scenarist. Both have some kind of Java implementation, but they're both high-level solutions. To just do Java development without worrying about the video, check out the "HD production handbook", and upcoming "HD production cookbook" (sked'ed for September). Bill: answer right now is "some assembly required". To do it professionally, you need players with debuggers. Kyle: some authoring tools have emulators. We've found that developers who develop with MHP tools can be ported to Blu-Ray in about a week, so go the MHP route, use the community and the tools. It'll be easier to switch to Blu-Ray when those evolve to Blu-Ray tools. Bill: check out hdcookbook.com, join the forums, check out the BD-J discussions. It'll be good to see what people can do at different levels of spending. The guy who did "Dragon's Lair" took some discs, looked at what was in there, decompiled... didn't work with an authoring tool.

Audience 2: If Sony & Sun want BD-J to win, why don't they get SDK's and tools out there? Bill: Blu-Ray Disc Association, and their 19 companies, don't want it to happen. Sun comes from a "give tools to people" mindset. It's $100,000 to just buy the specs for Blu-Ray, a very different culture. Lots of stakeholders, coming from a different industry. It's not like the computer industry. Phil: if these tools were available, it would definitely help Blu-Ray. That kind of stuff is available for HD-DVD, and it helps them. Mike: remember that Blu-Ray is pretty complex, and it takes a lot of time to develop these tools. Nothing out there where you could throw it to the masses and make everyone happy. Throwing full-blown Flash-like tools out there doesn't make sense for the system. Microsoft-like approach is more appropriate: give people some docs, let them do it. Bill: we're not actively trying to deny people information, we need more time. Everyone agrees that this needs to happen, get some agreement on when.

Audience 3: I'm tired of writing EJB's. Sounds like Microsoft has the path of least resistance for developers right now. In enterprise, we have tons of information, free tools, etc. At what point in the future, do we get some docs and tools. Do the studios want many developers, or just a few people at a few studios. Bill: studio hopes that we can create as many Blu-Ray titles as DVD. Audience 3: Does HD-DVD make it easier to get started? Are Java developers at a disadvantage because they're waiting for the BDA to get its act together? Bill: we work with other vendors; startups help us with this. Some developers come to us with just some ME experience.

CD's of Blu-Ray SDK's (Sequence) somewhere in this room? No, just the Fox contest that's Windows-only (speeeeeewww...)

Audience 4: I'm from a company that makes a BD-J tool, and if you're interested in this kind of thing, there are a lot of opportunities. Not as a stay at home developer, but with companies. Lot of positions out there.

Come for the power, stay for the community

I spent part of yesterday afternoon at the java.net booth, helping set up for podcasting the mini-talks, which start today at 11.

The booth arrangement is really nice this year: on one side, we have the kiosks for signage, literature, and computers, which allow community leads and project owners to show their stuff and meet with people. At the opposite side is the screen, speakers and podium for the mini talks, with a backdrop behind the screen so the light from nearby booths doesn't distract you. In front of the podium is seating for about 16-20.

And in between we have a pair of comfy sofas for java.net members to hang out in and enjoy the mini-talks from the back row. The sofas have a coffee table for your drinks/snacks/laptop, and on top of the table we have the rarest of all things at JavaOne: a power strip. Yes, you can relax and recharge in the booth... literally... while you meet other community members and get the 20-minute info dumps that are the mini-talks.

I did an interview with java.net Community Manager Marla Parker while the booth was still under construction, which you can hear as our latest podcast.

So do come by. Booth 532. Under the big orange "java.net" banner. Just listen for the sound of community and innovation.

The Power Game

JavaOne is underway, with a lenghty Monday morning general session laying out the future of the Java SE and Java EE platforms. I took dutiful notes, for use in a show recap that will appear on ONJava Wednesday night. When it was over, my battery had about a 21% charge.

That's when it hit me: there are no power stips in the public areas

Last year's JavaOne was generous with the access to power - my routine was to lounge by the video games atop Moscone South, plug in, and recharge.

Not so this year. I've already developed an eagle eye for spotting spare outlets: hey, there's a strip poking out from under that table... hey, there's a free outlet on the strip powering those XBoxes... hey, if I unplugged this SunRay, do you think anyone would notice?

Unless the situation is particularly better in the session rooms, we're going to have a whole bunch of dead batteries and unhappy campers early this afternoon.

I'm writing from the press room, which has a few strips hidden under the tables - battery now at 47% - but that's not a solution to everyone else who mingles in public areas. I'm thinking very seriously about walking up to CompUSA and buying a power strip to lug around this week so I can share what few outlets I find with others.

BTW, if you find a good source of recharge power, don't hoard! Please post it to the talkbacks!

Jeri topples Stalin

At a previous job, we developed a Jini-based system to discover and expose whichever of our services were present on a customer's network. This led to a large Jini federation within the company's network, which led to problems as we hopped firewalls to remote points on the WAN.

Complicating the matter was the network admins' all-too-typical Stalinist network policies, preferring to lock down every port except for 80, with maybe a few known ports exposed if they could be held to an absolute minimum. This is deadly for most RMI applications, which prefer to communicate over whatever sockets appear to be available.

I asked about this in a Jini session on Tuesday, and was told the answer was coming Wednesday.

Sure enough, session TS-1054 covered Extending RMI with Firewall Traversal and Serialization Caching, with a solution to my problems.

The solution is Jini's new Jini Extensible Remote Interface, aka Jini ERI, or just "Jeri". This new approach to RMI allows for pluggable implementations, allowing you to run your remote calls over old-RMI-type socketry, http, https, even JXTA and in-memory RMI.

So how does Jeri get past Stalin? The solution is to put a remote box outside the firewall or in a DMZ. This "relay" box listens on known ports for the server (inside the firewall) to connect to it. Once connected, the relay can use that connection to the server. The clients see the relay as the service — whether it's the relay box or server box is irrelevant — so they can participate in discovery and remote method calling as normal. Perhaps more importantly, use of an outside box (presumably it could be the box hosting the relay) allows the client to download classes that Jini tells it are needed. This completes the pieces we need for Jini - discovery, dynamic downloading of needed code, and remote method invocation.

And all it costs to keep Stalin from purging our app is a cheep box in the DMZ.

Apple @ JavaOne

Apple's JavaOne session this morning, Tech Manager Francois Jouaux and several other Apple representatives laid out the case for Java on the Mac, and why Java developers should develop on and for the Mac.

Saying that basic support of J2SE wasn't good enough, Jouaux went into Mac technologies that help Java applications work better. These include the Quartz Extreme graphics technology, which provides a speed boost to Java applications on Java 1.3.1 on Mac OS X 10.3, and for both Java 1.4 and 1.5 on the upcoming "Tiger" release of Mac OS X. He also pointed out how the 64-bit G5 processor improves performance for longs and doubles, since a G5 register can store a 64-bit value with a single machine-code instruction. He also pointed out the enterprise support of the XServe, which bundles JBoss, tomcat, WebObjects, and Apache Axis web services.

Today's announcements included improved support for Java in XCode, which now provides:

• ability to merge or copy jars
• ant and JUnit integration
• Java class modeling
• Java CodeSense
• improved deployment options
• J2EE XDoclet tasks from XCode

Matt Drance demo'ed the new XCode features, showing a Java 2D demo deliberately hobbled by unnecessary object creation in its animation loop. Using Apple's Shark tool, called with a simple -XrunShark command-line argument from XCode, he showed how to time-sample a running application, narrow down the slow parts, and bring them up in the XCode editor. This feature boost for XCode is available for Panther, the current Mac OS X release, and is available from the Apple Developer Connection site.

Next up, Stuart Cheshire spoke about the Rendezvous self-networking technology, which allows TCP/IP devices to assign their own addresses (if necessary, for example in a household network without DHCP), assign their own names, and use multicast discovery to browse the network for Rendezvous services. A huge hit in the printer world, Cheshire explained how an Apple VP was able to print transparencies to a network printer at a recent conference, completely without configuration and before the conference's surly tech guy could even finish his "we don't work with Apple's, they're so hard to work with" speech.

Of greater relevance to JavaOne attendees, Cheshire and fellow presenter Roger Pantos announced a Java library to use Rendezvous. Of particular interest was Apple's decision to re-make the API to make it more palatable to Java developers, by employing Factory and Listener metaphors and fashioning objects from the straight-C API (Apple's done this before, of course, in the form of QuickTime for Java). The Java bindings are currently available as part of the Rendezvous project in the Darwin open-source cvs repository. Cheshire and Pantos showed off the technology with a peer-to-peer chat application, written in Swing and Rendezvous and running on Windows and Mac laptops.

In a final bit of news, it was announced that the Java labs across the street at WWDC have filled up, so new sessions have been set up for Thursday. Registration for these sessions is at http://seminars.apple.com/private/wwdcjavalab

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