JavaOne 2008 Coverage - Day 1
May 7th, 2008 at 4:03 am by PSAR Arnhem Gerben DerksenFinally JavaOne 2008 (JAVA+YOU theme) has started. After hearing all the stories about it, it seems even bigger than I thought it would be. Everything is well organized and there are no time consuming queues. (compared to the JavaPolis conference in Antwerp)
After a fantastic streetdance show, the conference was opened by the hot shots of SUN. (although they try not to act like one 
) They had one message: Try to develop applications the world is waiting for. The world is YOU. The technology is there so use it. Be creative and create solutions which are accessible for everybody. They have to be easy to use and nice to see. (Apple philosophy?) Use sensors, like RFID, to collect real life data. With that data you can make real life applications.
After the opening two demo’s of JavaFX were showed. Both failed. Mmmmm
Beside the demos some other speakers had some time to speak. The Vice president of amazon gave a demo of the Kindle device. A device which can download and display books. (which fails to download the book, haha) A person of Sony Ericsson showed a vide. It was about the mobile multimedia vision of SE. Nice, but more or less a commercial.
The Glassfish project was also mentioned. A modular appserver that starts in less than a second. (the kernel alone) SUN is quite proud of that.
That’s all about the opening. Now the sessions:
JRUBY: What, why, how.. Do it now.
A not very motivating session about JRUBY by the two SUN developers who are working on that project. They did a short demo about Ruby and Rails. They said Netbeans 6.1 rc 1 is the very best Ruby editor. (so give it a try) Although Ruby is a nice innovative language it has to go a long way. A way JAVA has already made.
SOA and 35 million transactions a day
A German man working for the Fiducia company told a story how they build a SOA architectured transactional banking system in 1989. Although they do not use the standard technologies out there, he made some interesting remarks:
- Use no webservices when it’s not necessary. XML comes with a lot of overhead.
- Handle transactions yourself when using more than one datasource.
- Do not use BPEL kind of tools. Just program the orchestration yourself.
Project Wonderland
A very cool project of SUN’s research lab. It’s a Java based second life (kind of) focused on virtual working communities. The project started to encourage the social events around meetings. It’s opensource and extendable. Go get a look at: wonderlands.dev.java.net
At the end of the day I visited a discussion about GIS systems. Most of the time they spoke about what Google (maps) did to the little GIS companies. There was a little frustration among the audience.
I like to end with a slogan of Jonathan Schwartz: ‘Focus on users, and ur one of them’.
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May 7th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Sounds all interesting. What I wonder is this line you mentioned:
- Do not use BPEL kind of tools. Just program the orchestration yourself.
This sounds a bit strange to me; I would figure this depends on the circumstances. What is your opinion on it and did they back their statement up with some points as to why you should not use it.
As for the JRuby presentation. The hype seems to be over, maybe that’s why they were less motivated ? Everyone seems to know about their project and has accepted it as being the right tool for some projects. There were also no big improvements to it in the last months (JRuby 1.1 didn’t shock the world it was just an improved 1.0
) On the other hand NB6.1 is an interesting improvement for JRuby, although I found it to be a bit unstable.
Are you going to visit any sessions on Scala or Fortress ?
Have fun
May 11th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Hi Gerben,
You say: “Although Ruby is a nice innovative language it has to go a long way. A way JAVA has already made.”
Can you explain what you mean exactly? Ruby already exists since 1995, and in a lot of ways it’s very different than Java. The Rails framework is what made it so popular the last few years. I wonder in what way you think Ruby needs to develop compared to Java.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Hey Jesper,
I was thinking about things like internationalization, scalability, authorization/authentication, etc. I’m not an Ruby expert, but I get this feeling that not all of these things are out there for Ruby. Please correct me when I’m wrong.