JavaOne Day 1 (morning)

After attending 11 JavaOne conferences, I am quite used to the 'traditions' that differentiate this tech conference from most others. As usual, John Gage urged us all to be Brazilian this week. For those who may not be aware (you can watch the webcast videos), this means being much more sociable than you usually are, and introducing yourselves to others and finding out what we all do in the Java ecosystem. All year round, I attempt to be Brazilian on the soccer pitch but never quite succeed. And in past JavaOne's, I didn't bother to be so sociable because I had always been on a mission to learn as much as I could that was even remotely related to my work. But this year is going to be different, I am now a freelance developer and it makes all the sense in the world to meet potential partners and customers.

So what else was big news at the keynote? That Java is FOS (free and open source) under GPL v2 is old news (Nov '06), Rich Green simply announced that the implementation of that announcement has been completed. What took the audience by surprise was the announcement of JavaFX Script on plain old Java SE. JavaFX Script is, according to James Gosling, "... Buttons & Sliders Gone Wild ..." ;-). Chris Oliver was apparently the sole developer of this powerful presentation-oriented scripting language! As though this weren't enough, JavaFX Mobile was demonstrated on both the Jasper S20 and Nokia N800. James and Chris showed how easy it is to modify GUIs on the fly. James promised that they will be IDE support for JavaFX Script very soon. Chris was formerly a SeeBeyond employee. This is one of the occasional good side effects of acquisitions. When talented engineers join acquiring companies and are happy (my assumption), they can contribute strongly to the technology base there. JavaFX was known internally (at Sun) as Project F3 (Form follows Function). Having seen Ruby as a first class citizen in NetBeans, I'm looking forward to this too. Personally, I'm willing to totally skip the LCD UI era and go straight to JavaFX Mobile-based UIs on CDC devices.

The morning keynote also contained significant touchy-feelie, humanitarian, pro-education, digital divide-bridging announcements, but I'll leave you to read about it yourselves.

After the keynote, Chuk & I bumped into Peter Karlsson, a Solaris Evangelist, who happened to be thinking of doing the same thing as me ... i.e. waiting for the WowWee booth to open so we could procure the JavaOne show gadget. The RS Media robot (Developer Edition) runs Java MIDlets, has a camera, LCD display, SD card slot, USB link, IR and contact sensors, 2 hand-mounted speakers and a subwoofer in the back etc. Not too shabby for US$291 (incl. tax). Chuk (a Java Evangelist) and Peter will be using theirs for Sun Tech Days demos. 2 other teammates of theirs are already working on mounting a SunSPOT on its back so that acclerometer data can be fed to the Java ME runtime via a serial connection. I am looking forward to what comes out of that effort. Anyway Peter was 2nd in line and hauled his off to the hands-on labs room to find someone to babysit (robotsit?) it while he roamed the pavilion. I was right behind him and scurried back to my hotel room with mine so as to get back to the sessions I was targeting, and avoid being a walking show gadget FAQ, though that would've certainly helped in my quest to be more Brazilian. My purpose for the robot are less ambitious, just a few routines to amuse my 3 kids would satisfy me. And maybe a Celebrity Deathmatch bout with any of my friend's Lego NXT's ;-). Maybe I had a long unfulfilled need for something physical since I thoroughly enjoyed programming Robot Wars on my Apple ][. It's the same reason why I'm going to get myself a Playstation 3 at or before Christmas, certainly not to play all those FPS games ... heck, I had enough of firearms after 2-1/2 years of full-time national service and 11 years of army reserve. All the subwoofer power you can buy isn't the same thing as pulling the lanyard of a 155mm howitzer. Yes, the PS3 is a BD-J environment, something you can write code for ;-).

One nice difference about attending JavaOne with a Press badge this year was that I had access to all the specially arranged press conferences. On of them was the open source panel hosted by Simon Phipps, Sun's open source magnate. I didn't catch the names of all the attendees but amongst them were initiators, developers and lawyers from Apace, FSF, coupla open source projects and the founder of SouJava, the largest Java Users group in the world. While nothing discussed was really new to me and many of the passionate developers I know, what was enlightening was how much misconception there was amongst the tech press present. I can get into how some of them don't even realize that the typical profile of a prolific open source contributor is a highly-paid corporate developer who has their company's blessings, and many other related topics, but I am not really interested in sharing those kind of things. The only thing I heard that I will emphasize is that all the participants made it clear that their communities were more important than the code. Some of them went so far as it say that the partnerships formed could easily be transplanted over to a new project and eventually reproduce better software from scratch, but the code handed over to folks who had not gelled, would not fare as well.