JavaOne Recap II

This is part 2 of 2 of my experience at JavaOne 2008. In my first post, I wrote about coming features in the next versions of Java SE, EE and JSF. In this one, I’ll write about notes I took concerning JavaFX, Project Hydrazine, jMaki, NetBeans, and Scala.

JavaFX

JavaFX got a lot of attention by Sun this year and IDE support is supposed to be here now in Netbeans. I have to say though walking around the conference, the vibe was a little cynical and skeptical about JavaFX. Some of the negative comments I heard concerned the immaturity of IDE support, complaints about the syntax, and questions about competition from Silverlight and Flex.

Project Hydrazine

Project hydrazine seems to be Sun’s product in the whole cloud computing bandwagon. They talked about it, but didn’t really elaborate on it in any detail. The hydrazine marketing site is here.

jMaki

I heard a lot of buzz about this amongst the crowd. It sounded pretty cool. So yes, it’s yet another Javascript library to learn, but the difference is jMaki doesn’t try to re-invent the wheel, but uses multiple Javascript libraries to provide you with one interface to use the features of any of them. You could theoretically combine the features you like in dojo with the things you like in YUI and use only one, jMaki interface.

Netbeans

Netbeans was the IDE of choice for the Hands-On-Labs. I’ve never been a big fan of the Netbeans IDE’s in the past, because despite whatever features they might have had, it always seem rather slow and clucky to me. But it ran stellar during the labs. It had many of the same features I see in Eclipse and Intellij. It’s definitely on par with them. They showcased the javascript support at the conference. It was really good! Much better than I’ve seen in Intellij and Eclipse.

Scala

A lot of buzz around this. There was some unofficial talk about it as a possible replacement for the Java Language (i.e. Java 3). If you haven’t heard about Scala before, it’s a language with similar syntax to Java. It’s often described as both an Object Oriented and a Functional programming language.

JavaOne Recap

I had the opportunity to attend Java One this year! What follows is part 1 of a 2 part post describing my experience and things I learned.

The Theme

Sun was really pushing JavaFX and Mobile device development this year, although I’ve heard that the mobile push is every year. Netbeans and Glassfish got a lot of attention. Scala was unofficially talked about by some as a potential Java 3 language candidate.

Topics of Interest

Some of the topics and news I found interesting are listed below.

Coming in Java EE 6

• Reduction of the amount of XML you need to put in your deployment descriptor.
• Support for annotations for your filters, servlets and listeners. My assumption is that this will facilitate the reduction in XML configuration you need to write. A great side affect of this should be when you want to use any of the numerous web MVC frameworks out there, you should only need to plop the jar in your classpath (WEB-INF/lib) folder and be up and running without the need for web.xml changes.
• JAX-RS – An API for implementing restful WebServices.
• Scripting is “going to be treated as a first class citizen” (Not sure what that means really).

Coming in Java SE 7

• Concept of modules or superpackages to wrap your code for organization, versioning support, and better information hiding than private/protected scoping gives you. See JSR’s 277 and 294 for more information. (Perhaps Groovy could benefit from this )
• Sun says Applets are coming back, that they’re able to shrink the JVM to around 4.5mb, and that the cold start-up time for Applets will be equally as fast (or slow ) as a warm start.
• One really cool feature they demonstrated of applets is that you can drag and drop them onto the desktop now while they’re running and they’ll run outside of the browser.

Coming in JSF 2.0

The following came from a talk from Ed Burns and another gentleman from Sun on JSF 2.0 where the first 30 minutes they talked a lot about how JSF adoption is steadily increasing and how they’ve listened to the community, understand the pain points, and will improve JSF in version 2.0 of the spec. Some of the specific improvements/changes mentioned were:

• Better IDE support. (Not sure if this means they’ll release plugins for the major IDE’s or what)
• Facelets will be part of the spec.
• JSF Unit will better support testing.
• Faces Trace will help testing.
• Integration with Seam and Spring Web Flow. (Not sure how they mean and I haven’t used either of these, though I know the basic concept of what they are/do).
• Will simplify custom component creation by reducing the number of artifacts you have to produce.

Mobile Device Programming

• There were plenty of technical sessions on Mobile device API’s for communication, geolocation, etc., but most of the subject material of those were over my head so I haven’t summarized them here. I found those talks very enjoyable though.

Experience

I had a great time at Java One and would like to go back in a few years!

It’s not a conference to go to every year. I didn’t learn as much as I would have at a NFJS conference, but I got a broader range of information about the Java platform and where it’s heading and a great opportunity to meet others.

In part 2 of this post I’ll have notes on JavaFX, Project Hydrazine, jMaki, Netbeans and Scala.