Toys, Cells & JAVA

Last day. Thanks. Not that these talks aren't good (well there were some sleepers) but I want some time to digress and try out some of the cool stuff we've seen. And I miss home.

So, we shuffled along the 5 blocks from the hotel to Moscone this morning to see the "Toy Show" by daddy James Gosling. Let's see, what were the toys:

• Dtrace: dive into the inner, inner workings of your code at runtime. Right through the stack trace of Java class calls and down into the interrupts. Cool, but only works on Solaris right now.
• Some cool, but really lame virtual reality stuff. All out remote employees hooking up in this 'Wonderland'. Okay, it is cool, but it was cool back in the 'virtual reality' days, and we all know how that really took off.... anyway, hope I will eat my words on this b/c it would be cool... imagine stepping through your code, no not with +F6, with your feet man. Nice.
• They had some Java mini-robots, I guess they we're supposed to be the roadies from the mini-KISS band from the night before. Yeah, mini-KISS :)
• Some other Java 3-D remote controlled helicopter, a group of college students and their robot submarine. Neat, and kudos to them. I was yawning...

So we split, and finally got out of the 4^2 block JAVA infested area we'd been trapped in since Sunday and grabbed a cab down to Pier 33. That's where you catch the ferry to, yeah, Alcatraz. Go there. You get hooked with this sweet audio tour of the prison block. And it's not just some stiff 60's National geographic dude, this is a real production by an actual prison guard, complete with special effects and all. But, I won't spill any beans. If you have the chance, go there.

And then, keep walkin' down the road to Fisherman's Warf. Fairly touristy, but we lucked out on a nice crab place for lunch.

We walked those crabs off, heading back into town up Columbus Ave. And within a few blocks stumbled upon Lombard street. Had to see this, the crazy curvy street I'd seen a million times on tv. Three blocks away, or so my map said. (Hey map dudes, how about giving us some topo!) I stopped to get out our grappling hooks and spikes to tackle the mount... worth the elevational trek.

Back down to Columbus, we rolled that to around Grant and headed into Chinatown. Picked up some great stuff for the good ones back home, and hoofed it back to the Nikko.

Even though we took a breather this afternoon, JavaOne is great. First hand input to the entire scene. I will be posting ~30 presentations on the QD network asap.

Night.

End of Thursday

Some good talks today. They are posting all the presentations online until Friday, so I am pulling down some good ones and will put up on the QD network when I'm back in Reston.

Highlights:

• Groovy - awesome scripting on top of Java. ActiveX and Ant integration.
• Again, GWT - Google Web Toolkit, we stopped by the Google booth in the pavillion and got some more info. Seems that Google Checkout and most new Google web-ui's will leverage this toolkit.
• JSR-277 - Java Module System. Finally ending the classpath hell! Looks promising with a new .jam file spec (like a jar with module dependency information). Should be in JDK 7 (maybe 4 years :( ).
• Spring seems to be a very hot topic.
• And seems the JavaFX hype has really faded....
  

Wednesday update

Day 2

No pics from Wed, it was all code all day, we'll not all code. The first talk I attended, and easliy the best I've seen at the show was by Joe Winchester from IBM on how much UI's really suck today. His main point was that developers are not artists, and we need artists to create good uis. Funny as hell.. check out this blog for a good synopsis: http://www.cafeaulait.org/

Then it was on to jMaki = Javascript + (Maki = Japanese for Wrapper). It's a SUN thing and an attempt to wrap all the cool js ui widget libs out there with a common api. Coolest thing is the pub/sub message bus which let's you anoymously wire up your widgets to listen to each other.

Lunch = big long lines, fair lasnagne

First afternoon was GWT = Google Web Toolkit. They have made some progress, especially in the performance area, they can 'zip' up all your images into a single file which can be cached, pretty cool stuff, plus IDE support. I think this one may have some real potential.

Next, on to, Exteme GUI Makeover 2007. Awesome, awesome stuff. Animated, changing colors, flying cell table sorts. The coolest error handler you've ever seen, and more. I can't wait to get some code samples and show those .net guys.

Then, F3 = Java FX. Totally boring presentation, did nothing but walk through the demo app you can download. I was doing everything to stay awake, but wanted to stay to see what the story was on deploying these JFX apps. Well, the story is short, same as Java apps :(. That is really the last hurdle, if SUN and the community can crack that, then there are sunny skies ahead.

So far, biggest winners are
1. Swing is alive and well and well cool again (I think)
2. There are too many web toolkits, I am thinking you need to hedge your bets with with big boys.

InterSystems, then hooked us with some great sushi, thanks guys! Cache rocks :)

Foggy Start to Day 2

It's a foggy start to today, but looking forward to some cool sessions. Here's some other shots....

Just finished the opening session. After some killer techno bass dubbing, there are a number of sweet announcements.

• The open sourcing of Java is complete.
• New JavaFX rich app development platform (similar to flash stuff)
• New Mobile platform for Java Phones
• Faster, faster, faster JDK's promised over the next few months
• Real-time Java is REAL.

Day 1

After an early jet-lagged start to the day, the conference kicked off with a general session for the Java University, which was being held on Monday. Guess who we sat right behind...




My morning session was titled "Filthy Rich Clients" - it was about using the Swing toolkit to build way cool looking Web 2.0ish and Mac-OS-ish looking Java UIs. Some very cool stuff. Check out http://www.curious-creature.org. The talk was given by the two guys who wrote a book by the same title, due out in a couple of months.




Then a HOT lunch outside on the curb, they really put you up nice here :)




The afternoon was spent checking out Groovy and Grails. Groovy is a Ruby-esce scripting language which runs on the JVM. I think we have have some uses for it; if nothing else then for the fact that it has closures, which are like functions on steroids - they allow your to bind state to anonymous functions. Grails is a web-app building framework with a robust MVC architecture and some really nice data-binding support (wraps Hibernate). Check these things out, they are hot and cool topics.

Day 0

Whew - long time to sit crunched in a chair watching 2 movies and The Office (man that is a great show) to get here, I highly recommend getting an aisle and remember you can check in on the internet 24 hours before - don't sweat printing the boarding pass, they can reprint at the airport - I forgot. And, Warren, please remember what your bag looks like... Anyway, SF is beautiful and a city - a real change from the suburban life around Reston.

Look for updates here as to how things go, we'll be posting any cool Java stuff we stumble upon. AND, top notch kudos to everyone on the Affinity M5 GO-LIVE this weekend!

Tomorrow, is an early 7AM day; attending the Java University sessions, where we'll be checking out the Spring Framework, the zk and Google Web Toolkits, as well as Groovy and Grails. Some cool stuff.