JavaOne 2008 Day 1
A conference typically starts off with a keynote and JavaOne is no different. This is Sun’s biggest opportunity to brainwash its Java faithfuls, realign them and get them excited about the latest innovations Sun would like to take off. So if you expect any relevant technical information then this is the wrong session to attend, because this is all about marketing and hyping. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see what hype might be coming next. Whether this will make into a product you can bet your business on is a completely different story.
John Gage was the host, as usual, but Rich Green, James Gosling, and Jonathan Schwartz got most of the airtime.
Most exciting from Canoo’s point of view was RIA being one if not the topic of the keynote. Finally, Sun has realized that plain ugly web applications are not good enough anymore. Their solution to this challenge is JavaFX which was introduced at last year’s keynote, but, frankly spoken, has not seen much progress in the last year. This year Sun expects JavaFX to be the centerpiece for a unified Rich Internet Experience both on the desktop and on mobile devices (and even Blu-Ray players). One demo showed how a JavaFX application running in the browser can be dragged to the desktop and continues to run there even after closing the browser. I was most surprised by the announcement that JavaFX will run on top of Android. Looks like Sun is trying to embrace this renegade platform rather then suing them.
In addition, Sun intends to heat up the desktop competition by making Java SE slimmer and slicker. Java is now also included with Ubuntu and RedHat by default and other Linux distributions are to follow soon. The guest star of this year’s keynote was Neil Young who praised Java for helping him to realize the documentation of his musical career to be released on Blu Ray. The demo of which was really impressive, and by the way one of the few demos that worked (the demo gods were not really benevolent). The bottom line of the keynote was that Sun is trying to get back to the desktop, the server-side of Java was hardly a topic. On another note I had the feeling that the attendance numbers keep decreasing. There also seem to be less exhibitors than last year. Probably also a sign of the weakening economy.
On the first day I attended two sessions. Josh Bloch is one of my favourite speakers and therefore I could not miss his talk on “More Effective Java”. I was not disappointed. He presented a few chapters (esp. enums and lazy initialization) from the second edition of his “Effective Java” book and it is always fun to learn about the intricacies of the Java language. If you ever have a chance to listen to Josh Bloch, don’t miss it!
The second talk was about GUI testing using the FEST library. Just a few weeks ago I read a paper written by Alex Ruiz who is the lead developer of this library. I was pretty much convinced by the concepts, the implementation and esp. the nice Domain Specific Language for developing programmatic tests for Swing user interfaces. The presenters, however, were not as convincing, but my judgement might be unfair having just attended Josh Bloch’s session before. One interesting piece of information was that when asked most attendees prefered programmatic GUI testing over play-record GUI testing.
