I briefly broke my mantra this afternoon and went to a session on Java Studio Creator. I lasted just past the agenda before I walked out. It looked to be a justification talk - telling us that Creator was made for corporate dummies that don't write code for a living. I skipped across the hall to a session on developing plugins for Eclipse. It was quite interesting and really made it look easy to develop plugins. I almost fell asleep quite a few times, but that's probably from the booze still peculating in my veins.
The best thing I got from the talk was tips and tricks for developing with Eclipse. I watched Eric Gamma do a lot of shortcuts to and quick fixes that I didn't know about. I probably won't remember them past today, but they were cool nevertheless. Now I'm off to the hotel to charge my camera and get ready to pull an all-nighter before our early-morning departure.
I'm continuing my theme to only attend sessions I know little about. I'm sitting in a session on the J2ME Wireless ToolKit. So far it's fairly boring. This guy's been rambling on for a while about all the JSRs that the toolkit implements. Now he's doing a demo and using the Network Monitor to demonstrate looking at the HTTP requests when making soap calls.
This is only my 4th session of JavaOne, and I haven't been to any BOFs. I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Most of my time in Moscone is spent sitting in the main lobby, hacking away at my e-mail and talking with folks. I never imagined I'd meet so many people. It's pretty damn cool to meet all the bloggers.
The tools and demo that this guy is showing look like good monitoring and emulating tools. The WTK doesn't appear to have an IDE, just a way to run midlets and see the results. It doesn't appear to have an IDE. If I was to compare this to the web world, I'd say that the WTK is really just a web browser. Of course, it's much more than that since it can emulate HTTP requests, and well as bluetooth. From what I can tell, a midlet is really just a Java application that can run on a mobile device.
After googling a bit, it looks like I was right. How easy is it to unit test midlets? Do you have to constantly use an emulator to test stuff? I'd like to write an AppFuse client for my phone, but I also want to use TDD to do it.
I missed the rest of the presentation b/c I got lost in reading blogs. Attending these sessions with an open laptop is not a good idea. I hope I can make one more session today - my goal was 5 for the week. As Dion said, this conference is all about networking.
Went to bed at 5, up at 9. I haven't had a hangover this week, and I'm still drunk from last night. As I'm sobering up at 1:00 in the afternoon, I feel my breakfast making an attempt to see the light of day. I have lots of photos (and video) from the evening's activities, but no cord to upload them onto my computer and the web. Will do so tomorrow. These Java guys can't dance for shit. I could use another Irish Car Bomb right now. 5 and 1/2 hours until the festivities begin again. Bruce and I have a 6 a.m. flight to Denver tomorrow - should be fun going to the airport. Maybe we should just check out of hotel today.
Rendezvous rocks on the Mac. Wouldn't it be nice if you could use it between platforms or even in your Java apps? You will be able to shortly...
Apple released a developer's preview of Rendezvous Networking for Windows 2000 & XP at wwdc 04. ... Also released was support for various POSIX platforms, including Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD, as well as making it callable from Java. [MacRumors]
