Yesterday JavaOne 2008 kicked off:
Attendants were welcomed in the General Session by various dancing acts.
Then James Gosling was tossing his personally designed t-shirts.
The prediction that a Java Posse member made yesterday at CommunityOne that Jonathan Schwartz will make a joint appearance with Steve Jobs, hug on stage and announce that Java will be available on the iPhone was… not fulfilled.
Instead we were shown a biometric censors experiment held in Moscone during JavaOne. BTW all badges are RFID and scanned with a nokia phone. They also demonstrated the usage of sensors and Java code for measuring and manage climate inside Moscone.
Then Rich Green:
- Invited Ian Freed of Amazon on stage who talked about the Kindle and gave a short presentation that illustrated how Java empowers this device. If you didn’t know it ALL Kindle applications are Java.
- Invited Rikko Sakaguchi from Sony Ericsson on stage who showed a promotional video of a new device that will be launched later this year and said that “Java is the core strategy of Sony Ericsson”!
- Showed a demo with Facebook and LiveConnect app/plugin that uses JavaFX. Showed it also on a JavaME phone. Really impressive, even though the slow Moscone network created problems.
- Continued with a JavaFX demo that demonstrated that emphasized on the design capabilities of the technology. It was really eye pleasing. Also emphasized the 3D, HD video and sound capabilities of the platform.
- Repeated the ConnectedLife demo on the Google Android emulator.
- Talked about Glassfish modular new architecture.
One of the highlights was the appereance of Neil Young on stage. He talked about his effort to collect all his musical legacy to BlueRay and how Java enables him to provide an nice interface to it all. I would have liked it if he could stayed a bit longer and had his guitar with him 🙂
After the general session I had the pleasure of accidentally meeting Doris Chen, one of our beloved Java Evangelists that visit Greece regularly to talk about the latest and greatest in Java Land.
The conference is so huge and packet with people from all over the world that I would suggest to Sun to consider something like JavaOne Europe.
Continuying with the individual sessions that I personally found more interesting:
“The Duke and the Elephant: PHP Meets Java? Technology–the Best of Both Worlds” by Rob Nicholson
- Why use PHP (fairly obvious)
- Why use PHP+Java+Groovy: leverage the power and communities of all platforms
- WebSphere sMash: Agile application development using dynamic scripting and RESTful Web Services (based on JSON?)
- They seemed to have implemented some kind of PHP 5 runtime over Java SE. It sounds very interesting and I’ll have to look into the licensing information.
Blogger Q&A with Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green
- How long Jonathan spents blogging and other related questions
- Bloging company policy and sensorcip
- JavaFX platform questions
- Sun/Google/Android
- Java and iPhone
- more…
“JavaScript? Programming Language: The Language Everybody Loves to Hate” by Roberto Chinnici
Outline:
- Introduction to the functional nature of JavaScript
- Mentioned that you can only have scope through functions (but later showed scope with objects)
- Suggested that some Higher Order Functions library might be useful
- Said that with no tail recursion it is easy to blow a stack
- Browser implementations are primitive
- Made a reference to Google project Caja
- Showed several examples form frameworks like Dojo, jQuery and Prototype that alienated the typical Java programmer.
For those who don’t know yet, Roberto is one of the people that brough us Phobos. As I suggested after the discussion they should really put an effort to making it work with continuation. This is a programming model quite different then the one most web developers are accustomed to and it would strengthen Phobos position as an alternative framework. Especially as we enter more and more to the era of server-side Javascript with products like Jaxter by Aptana and the long awaited Rhino on Rails by Google.
BTW Roberto some of your comments where a bit biased against the functional and prototypical nature of the language but we all know you love it 😉
“Building Secure Mashups with OpenAjax” by Jon Ferraiolo
- What is the OpenAjax Allience
- The interoperability problems between the various toolkits
- OpenHub 1.0 -> enables multiple ajax runtimes to work together (pub/sub). Included in the Dojo framework
- Security issues in mashups
- OpenAjax Hub 1.1 -> Adds pub/sub with the server (eg. Comet) and framework for secure mashups
- OpenAjax Metadata
Dio Synodinos 