JavaOne 2008 Day 4
The last day started off with a Sun general session. James Gosling was the host and invited the most interesting products or prototypes of this year’s show up on the stage for a demo. Two products are worth mentioning from my point of view. A company called Sentilla released a sensor running Java and it also comes with a software development kit. The hardware has a number of different sensors, such as accelerometer, temperature sensor etc. The sensor is tiny, can be connected wirelessly and requires very little power. For example, if attached to a railroad car the vibrations of the train on the move could generate enough power to keep this sensor running. The second product was LiveScribe and the demo was nothing short of stunning. LiveScribe is a pen running Java and equipped with an optical sensor, a microphone and and LCD display. You need special paper for it to work (the paper can be printed at home for free on certified laser printers). The pen records everything you write and can even record audio while writing. It can also be controlled by pointing the pen to “printed buttons”. Notes written with this pen can be viewed and even replayed on a desktop computer. The audio recording naturally enhances the written information. There is also an SDK available. For example, applications can further process the results of the built-in handwriting recognition. One demo demonstrated this by translating words being written to a foreign language. This product is a real eye opener.
The next session was titled “Designing Graphical User Interfaces 101: From User Needs to Usable GUIs”, a promising title but a real disappointment. The session was already over after 30 minutes (rather than 60 minutes) and the two presenters had barely enough material to fill even that. Sometimes I really wonder how the quality assurance in the selection process is executed.
Our company had two talks at the conference and the talk “Going Mobile with Java FX, Groovy, and Android” was so popular that a rerun was held on Friday afternoon. Having missed the first run I had now the opportunity to attend this presentation. Mike and Dierk made a really good show and this was one of the few session that dared to see past the marketing hype of Java FX. Hats off to Sun for accepting sessions that are critical about technologies Sun would like to push.
My last session of this year’s JavaOne was “Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java Technology”. Flex is certainly one of the more promising contenders in the RIA domain and I was eager to learn how Flex and Java can be combined to develop such applications. Unfortunately, the presenter while not being from Adobe just repeated the Adobe marketing message: Flex is so cool! The presentation quality was pretty bad: confusing demos, way too much text on the slides and too many technical details out of context (again quality assurance should have stepped in during the selection process). One interesting side note: when the presenter asked the audience who is using Flex surprisingly few hands showed up.
Wrapping up JavaOne 2008, this conference emphasized the rediscovery of the desktop, announced the age of mobile devices (again), saw less attendees, and had the worst network performance I have experienced at any conference (regardless of wired or wireless connection).
