javaone2007: it seems the sun is shifting
Wednesday 9 May 2007 @ 6:03 pm
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JavaOne 2007 is only just one day on its way, the first couple of 81 hours have been past, and my maximum information observing level has been reached already: Too much to check out the coming weeks. Too many high impact announcements. Too many cool new technologies, too many new tools and too many new paradigm shifts.

Thou shall open up everthing you got, except for some key strategically important technologies, and thou shall spread the words to open up everything. Under the safe covers of being a community is more important than being a regular old company, open source is the new paradigm. Open opportunities as Sun is like to call it. Great move I think! And its paying off already. Except for the JDK, which is conceptually a big step to open up but practically nothing but a small give-away, goofy things are seing the light under Sun’s GPLv2 umbrella.

But Sun is making more, not unexpected but also not foreseen, movements. Where, in my very humble opinion, Sun was traditionally not very well doing in the area of user interaction (Does the term metal look and feel still rings a bell?), they seem to have been paying more attention and energy on this topic. Possibly driven by competition, Sun (just like Microsoft by the way) is following the vision of MacroMedia (indeed, not Adobe’s vision unless vision can be bought) and has been moving into the direction of rich internet applications (or integrated rich clients as they tend to call it). Form follows function has become JavaFX: A stunning way to re-implement applets. Hopefully marketing can handle it this time.

More news? Yep Real time java has finally been born so JSR-1 can be removed from the todo-list. Blu-Ray is currently hot topic. And Glassfish V3, the reference implementation of EE5, only needs a 100Kb bootstrap and starts up in less then half a second unless some serious applications have been deployed. (By the way, glassfish seems to have a pretty slick architecture for an application server and another by the way seems to be the question whether we want to use commercial available application servers from the old pre-ee5-era if this thing is really as good as the five minute demo has shown us.) Oh, and before I forget, everyone should sheck out NASA’s project World Wind, google earth as a swing widget. And in the tradition of the new openness completely free to abuse!

Finally, and this could be experienced during last years conference already, other languages than Java are not �wrong’ or �dirty’ anymore. Ruby has been adopted as a first class citizen of the virtual machine and the JRuby team has not been hired to implement a funny scripting language, but seems to be hired to jump on the bandwagon not as a an ignorant passenger but more as fully armed musketeers. It is very impressive to see how Sun is dealing with the shift from java to other languages. And it is also very impressive to see the progress that has been made in tool support. Last years netbeans hype was a bit overdone but this year there are enough reasons to promote the upcoming version 6. As far as I could see, changes are fair Netbeans will become the platform of choice to develop Ruby, and especially Rails, applications.

— By Okke van 't Verlaat     PermaLink

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