Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Hi everyone and welcome to Jazoon ’09!

At Sihlcity just a few tram-minutes away from Zurich’s city center, Jazoon ‘09 begins in the biggest auditorium (now full) with some very loud video sequences. Chris – from I don’t know where – tries his best to wake up a clearly very sleepy audience. He fails. More coffee for the audience please!

Next up a rerun of the Monty Python-esque “Brief History of Java” featuring JG… who now takes to the stage!

We’ve already seen James “the man thanks to whom I could purchase my first house” Gosling hanging around the exhibition center this morning. Title of his keynote: “Where we’re heading”.

JG puts the network at the center of things; emphasises the ubiquity of Java (nice observation: more Java devices than humans on the planet!) Other rough estimates: 6M Java developers (most of them rubbish, I should note – OK I suppose that was a bit harsh) and 15M JRE downloads per week on average – not including the PC’s that are rolled out with a JRE!

Some impressive examples of major Java apps: Brazilian healthcare, Large Hadron Collider (at the physics research institute CERN near Geneva etc. etc. This is indeed true: Java is everywhere. I don’t know how many JavaCards I have in my wallet.

JG now emphasises the VM, giving it more importance than the Java language. I naturally think of Google’s Android and the completely re-architected VM called Dalvic.

Next up: JG demos Glassfish V3 and in particular talks about the simplifications that have taken place since V2. Annotations and injections are basically the key to this. I’m reminded of a project I did on V2 a little while back. Other than the integration with MQ Series (which proved a little tricky) Glassfish turned out to be one of the most satisfying App Server experiences I’d ever had. Glassfish succeeds in combining the characteristics of being super-easy to install and configure, and yet it is clearly highly scalable; IBM please take note. I’m not on Sun’s payrole, I promise!

JG now demos the Hudson integration server as well as Kenai, which he describes as a cloud service for development. Amongst other things, this allows development for hardware which one may not actually own or have access to.

Next up: Java Real Time. The challenge: How to garbage collect (GC) deterministically. JG talks about the balance GC designers needs to find between performance and determinism. Rightly notes that there are even stock exchange apps, which require this level of control.

Talking of “control”, JG describes Neal Young’s LincVolt car and the degree of control that Real Time Java has and how this leads to superior efficiency.
And on the subject of efficiency, JG compares Java performance with C++ and is happy to note that in most everyday situations Java is way ahead.

A subject close to my heart: JSR248, the Mobile Services Architecture which is designed to unify a bunch of individual JSRs. The motivation for this is that to-date mobile hardware vendors have consistently delivered different combinations of JSRs, which basically makes a joke of write-one-run-everywhere. The bad news from JG: MSA still has a way to go. Good news for Android?

Changing direction, JG notes that the Web is now the face of the organisation. JavaFX will (apparently) deliver a Flash-like (to use JG’s expression) experience to address the expectations of the next generation of end-users.

JG describes some of the basic JavaFX features and talks about the graphical design tool that was demo’d at JavaOne – but stresses that it’s a long way from GA. Back to what can be done today: Using Photoshop and Illustrator to create a static UI design, which can be subsequently programmed out by the JavaFX developer. This is precisely what I talked about at J1 a few weeks ago.

Exit JG stage left to applause.

Well, it’s now off to the sessions. Tune in later for some more live session blogging!!!

How did we end up here?

Before discussing Canoo’s attendance at MWC 2009, it’s worth reflecting what brought us here. The story arguably began at Canoo’s Code Camp 2007, where one of the teams thought they’d try out something called “JavaFX”. At that time an early version of JavaFX had just made its debut at JavaOne ‘07 and the guys were keen to take the technology for a test-drive. And voilà… MusicPinboard was born. Little did we know at the time that the resulting, appealing little application would result in Sun Microsystems contacting Canoo in October 2008 to ask if we’d like to participate in the “November” launch of the first official version of JavaFX. A rewrite of the app ensued (because official JavaFX differed significantly the ‘07 version in a number of respects) and the launch took place slightly later than originally scheduled, in December, at an invitation-only event in sunny San Francisco. The application demo’d by Canoo at this event struck a chord with the attendees and Canoo was subsequently invited to create a mobile version of MusicPinboard to coincide with the launch of a mobile version of JavaFX.

About the MWC

The Mobile World Congress is the biggest of its kind, featuring a four-day exhibition of over 1200 world-class firms, as well as technical sessions and keynotes from CEOs of Microsoft, Vodafone, Nokia, to name but a few.

It is therefore significant that Sun should choose this particular venue to launch its mobile variant of the JavaFX, entitled – logically enough – JavaFX Mobile. Equally significant was the presence of Sun top-executives, such as Messrs. Eric Klein and Param Sing – VP and Senor Director of Java Marketing respectively, as well as Executive Vice President of Application Platform Software Anil Gadre. Also at the Sun booth: Canoo senior developers Mike Mannion and Alberto Mijares.

On Display at the the Sun Booth

Naturally enough, all of the technologies on show at the Sun booth related to mobile technology in some way or another.

For example, there was a demo of the Glassfish Mobility Platform, which, by means of a connector architecture, enables the enterprise to sync mobile devices with potentially any enterprise application. Sun streaming TV technology was also on display as was LWUIT (Lightweight UI Toolkit) – a UI toolkit library for Java ME. But there can be no doubt that most of the booth’s emphasis was on JavaFX and JavaFX Mobile, with a range of hands-on demos on show. These included:

• A mock security video monitoring system, which constantly looped through a scenario in which a bunch of crooks attempt a break-in at the Sun site. This demo was so impressive, in fact, that a number of people came to the stand to ask when the “security product” would be available!
• A very attractive mock social networking app for sharing restaurant and location information with buddies;
• A cute game involving bunnies, which we presume was designed to suggest that JavaFX is suitable as gaming platform;
• Canoo’s MusicPinboard application in both desktop and mobile forms, which Mike and Alberto used to describe the use of JavaFX tools Production Suite and NetBeans 6.5

On show: MusicPinboard Mobile

As previously announced Canoo was in attendance to demonstrate its recently created MusicPinboard Mobile application – an application created using the first official version of JavaFX Mobile. Around forty detailed demonstrations were given over the four-day period. In addition and in response to the questions from the attendees, Mike and Alberto also talked in detail about how the application was realised using the JavaFX Production Suite tools and the JavaFX plug-ins for the NetBeans IDE.

Here is the application running from within the NetBeans IDE:

The technical challenges encountered during the development were also freely discussed on the Sun stand, as were issues with the current version of the runtime, which sits atop Java ME on the hardware.

Here is the application running on Sony-Ericsson’s high-end Xperia device:

Most Frequently Asked Questions (and who was asking them)

Without a doubt, the most frequently asked questions were the following:

• What is JavaFX?
• What is the difference between JavaFX and JavaFX Mobile?
• Concerning JavaFX development: What kinds of tools are available today and what is the quality of these tools?
• When will JavaFX Mobile be deployed to commercially available devices in the way that Java ME is today?
• How well does the JavaFX Mobile Runtime perform and what is its footprint?

We (Canoo) will not attempt to answer these questions in this post, but will address them over the coming weeks and months as yet more experience is gathered and whilst Sun continues to actively improve the platform.

Above: Canoo’s Alberto Mijares (center) engaging with one of the many parties interested in JavaFX

As for who was asking these questions: The vast majority of the people who witnessed our demonstration were clearly strategic decision makers in the CEO/CTO bracket. Some folks came from research departments and even some software developers (people like us!) made it to Barcelona too.

Independent Opinion on the Stand Greatly Appreciated

When Mike Mannion delivered an (arguably) sobering evaluation of the state of JavaFX in a talk at JavaOne in 2008, the last thing he expected was for Sun to give him a call and request a repeat performance. Yet Sun DID call him and he DID give his talk a second time (clearly because, even at that time, there were also many positive things to say about JavaFX in addition to the negative.)
Now, when Sun is officially launching JavaFX / Mobile, why would Sun be giving an opportunity to independent third parties to express freely their opinion about a brand-new (read: immature) technology? It comes down to this: Sun receives constructive feedback, reenforces its credibility with potential users of the technology and, at the same time, demonstrates its confidence in the technology’s future. It is therefore perhaps surprising that not more organisations take this open and enlightened approach.

Win-win-win

We can testify first hand that Sun is a company that embraces open discussion – not just open source – and (constructive) criticism of its technologies. The response from the public made it perfectly clear that this is a win for all parties; in particular, potential client get an unabridged opinion, whilst Sun reenforces its credibility. And Canoo? Canoo looks good too

Above: Canoo’s Mike Mannion (left) with Sun’s Executive Vice President of Application Platform Software: Anil Gadre.

On December 4, Sun officially launched it’s long-awaited client scripting language JavaFX. Since JavaFX was first announced back at JavaOne ‘07 it has been subject to a major re-working – both in terms of language as well as marketing.

As one of the handful of launch partners, Canoo had more than a little interest in seeing just how Sun would choose to position it’s latest offering on day #1. So here’s a compact (and subjective) summary of the key messages delivered at the event:

Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz took to the stage to emphasise, in particular, that “reach” (read: accessing volume i.e. consumer markets) is the key to generating revenues through a one-to-one relationship with the end-consumer. JavaFX supposedly supports this relationship by (a) being precisely designed to address consumer needs; (b) permitting applications launched in the browser to be dragged onto the desktop (a feature entitled drag-to-install), thereby eliminating Messrs. Firefox, Safari, IE etc. from subsequent interactions.

It should be noted, perhaps, that this latter is actually enabled by JRE 6 update 10 – and has little or nothing to do with JavaFX per se, except that it definitely enhances the end-user’s experience.

Beyond this message, JS personally demonstrated some very slick sample applications, mostly focusing on JavaFX’s multi-media capabilities as well as the aforementioned drag-to-install feature.

Sun’s VP of marketing Eric Klein together with JavaFX platform director Nandini Ramani showed some more apps, the drag-to-install feature (again), as well as the designer-developer workflow. The Klein/Ramani demonstrations can be viewed here.

Now, obviously there are a lot reasons to question whether or not JavaFX will succeed in a marketplace dominated by Adobe’s Flex/Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. It’s pretty clear that JavaFX cannot compete features and, at this stage at least, maturity.

One reporter at The Register felt that Sun was most likely confusing the audience by placing so much emphasis on consumer devices, when Java’s foothold is clearly in the enterprise.

Given the content of the presentations alone this observation would be entirely understandable. However, having personally spoken to several high-level representatives of the JavaFX platform during the event, I personally left the event very confident that Sun intends to give the enterprise just as much emphasis as the consumer – irrespective of all the cool looking multi-media stuff on show at the launch. After all, it makes no sense whatsoever to ignore the on-going needs of to thousands of major corporations around the planet, which have made a strategic commitment to the Java platform.

The intimacy of the affair gave Canoo relatively high presence. Clearly various key members of the marketing team were thrilled with Canoo’s work and message revolving around the new version of the Musicpinboard (http://musicpinboard.com) application. Here’s Eric Klein thanking the launch partners for their efforts:

And here am I talking to JavaFX architect and media specialist John Burkey (John is the one with the hair):

Finally, Hans-Dirk and myself managed to catch Jonathan Schwartz a demonstration of the Musicpinboard application before he jetted off to his next appointment… (no pic unfortunately!)