Intel opened the day. Intel? What has Intel to do with Java? Well they build platforms to run Java. And they do that by the tock-tick model. At the tock they launch new, better and faster hardware. At the tick they make it smaller and more power efficient. Intel also works together with SUN on projects to make software benefit from Intel’s hardware features. For example: They work on the next JVM to make it faster on Intel’s platform. At the moment they have reached a 68% performance increase. (I think for some parts of the JVM) A spinning globe (YES, Nasa World Wind!! ) visualized the performance increase.

Today’s sessions:

Advanced Web application security
This session was all about Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS). The speakers (Jeremiah Grossman; Joe Walker) explained how to detect and reduce the change of an attack. Nowadays 90% of the sites are not well protected against CSRF or XSS attacks.

The third leg of SOA: Identity
The bottom line of this session was to decouple security from applications. (services) It’s better to dynamically decorate service request with security. SUN has a ‘METRO’ product that can help you do the trick.

Java Platform Performance: Case studies in Bottleneck Identification and removal
I have to admit, this session was so boring I couldn’t keep focusing. But, if you want to see this bad presentation then go get it from the JavaOne website. (after the conference has ended)

Designing Graphical Model-Driven Applications: Lego MindStorm
This session was one big demo that (almost) succeeded. After drawing an UML diagram a Domain Object Model was generated. This Domain object Model was coupled to temples and generated code in Netbeans. With the Visual Library of Netbeans an UI was made to write a program with the generated code. The graphical designed application was uploaded to a Lego Mindstorms robot. The robot walked and…. fell. Very cool techniques!!

For me, grid computing was quite surprising. But it seems that Oracle has bought BEA systems. (I missed that one ) BEA systems has nice tools for dynamic grid computing. And even an own JVM (JRocket) . The presentation showed the results of adaptive processor and memory capacity adding after an increased load on the running system. Looked very nice.

Todays presentations:

Ten ways to destroy your community

Josh Berkus is a professional communication guy and advises companies how to ‘open source’ their software. The presentation was about what NOT to do when you try to build an open source community. There are ten golden rules:

1. Use difficult tools.
2. Poisonous people
3. Make/publish no documentation at all
4. Make decisions in closed meetings
5. Legalese, legalese, legalese
6. Bad liaison
7. Governance obfuscation
8. Screw around with licenses
9. No outside commitments
10. And be silent

Very cool and clear presentation. I think you can google Josh Berkus to get more info.

Open source SOA with service component architecture and Apache Tuscany

Very technical presentation about the Apachy SCA specification implementation. A long demo was given by two hard to understand guys. They showed how to build components, define services on it, wire up the services, how to define bindings and how to deploy the services. Interesting but hard to understand (At least for me ). But I think it’s worth to have a closer look at it.

Ajax and JavaServer Faces Technology: Natural Synergy

Kito Mann explained JSF and the ways of combining JSF with Ajax. There are three ways of using Ajax within JSF.

1. Sprinkling - Adding Ajax to normal JSF components
2. AJAX inside - JSF component have their own javascript and service layers
3. AJAX outside - use for example JMaki

If you want to use a little Ajax on JSF, the best thing to do is using MyFaces Tomahawk of Apache. (according to Kito) Late 2008 the 2.0 version of JSF will be ready. (with Ajax support)

Nasa World Wind, 3D earth in your application and web pages

A very cool and funny presentation by Tom Gaskins. He and his team build an easy to use component (like a JButton) which can be used in applications and applets to show a 2 1/2 or 3D globe with detailed information. A demo showed how really easy it is to use and extend World Wind with extra layers. Eight lines of code does the trick. Go take a look at: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

That’s all for today.

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’.