Raible Designs

JavaOne 2006 Begins

After 3 hours of sleep, I'm up bright and early - attending the JavaOne Keynote. They're still shuffling people in, and have this awesome reggae-type band jamming. They're really good - I hope they're here later this week. The wireless sucks (as usual), so I'm using bluetooth to connect. Watch this post, I'll update it as the good announcements come.

We're starting off with a 10 minute overview of the Schedule Builder and how to use it. For those sessions that are full, apparently they'll schedule a 2nd showing. Most most sessions, there's already available online in PDF. After the show, most sessions should be available online in video form. Everyone should act like a Brazilian at this conference - meet people you don't know and learn as much as you can.

Jonathan Schwartz is on stage, dressed in a suite, talking about how they're offering a now offering a "Free Kit" on their website. Apparently, you can now get their Niagra servers for free. Sounds wierd, who knows if it's true. This JavaOne is the largest JavaOne ever, as apparent from this exhibition hall. "The Java community has never been more vibrant." The JCP has 1052 members. Of these, Jonathan says there aren't enough individuals on this committee. Everyone should go out and join. The community defines the future of Java.

Now there's a guy from Motorola on stage. He's the guy who originally introduced Java at this conference 11 years ago. The next few years will be just as crazy as the last 10 years for Java - only it will happen on a high-speed mobile network. In the mobile space, their are a lot of proprietary things going on. By encouraging and using Java, applications can be developed and deployed easily across many mobile devices. Motorola is selling 200 million phones this year. They've shipped 90 million in the last 6 months. Java needs to stay unified so write-once, run anywhere works on all devices. Motorola is publishing many open source projects for Java and Linux on http://opensource.motorola.com. To summarize, Motorola alone out-ships the PC industry.

Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical, Inc. is now on stage. Mark is deeply involved in the Ubuntu community. As of today, Java will be directly available to Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, etc. Apparently, this is because Sun has made some changes that allow it to be distributed with Linux. They're talking about Linux on Niagara - it sounds like there might be some announcements around this during the week. There's still no announcements about open-sourcing Java or re-licensing.

Mark Fluery has now been invited up on stage. He's got a red beret on. The Red Hat deal closes on May 31st. JBoss is joining the NetBeans community. Mark seems to think the next big thing in Java is Tools. Seems like a publicity stunt since they're talking about Netbeans. It will be interesting to see if JBoss becomes heavily involved in IDE development. Expect more innovation. You should expect more from the future, from the companies that provide Java, and from the community that uses it. Jonathan's first act of congress in his new post was to ask someone to return to Sun. Rich Green is the Executive VP of Software for Sun. He's been back at Sun for a week and a half, and he's been in meetings the entire time.

"Are you going to open source Java?", asks Jonathan.

"It's not a question of whether, it's a question of how." replies Rich.

So there you have it. They're going to open source Java, it's simply a matter of getting through all the politics and compatibility-issues to make it happen. Rich is now on stage by himself, encouraging the audience to get more involved in Java. Java EE 5 was recently approved. Now they've invited the Java EE Expert Group on stage. Everyone has a company sign to show. My name is on the slide, but it doesn't look like individuals were invited. Oh well, it's not like I contributed anything.

Jeff Jackson, Senior VP of Java Enterprise Platforms and Developer Products is now on stage. Java EE 5 is the big thing at the conference this year, and has all the right stuff: Ease of Development, simplified programming model with annotations, EJB 3.0 support for POJOs, new Java Persistence API, Web 2.0 Support, .NET Interoperability, Simplified SOA. NetBeans 5.5 supports Java EE today, so Jeff recommends you download it today.

Jeet Kaul is now on stage and he's going to do a demo of developing an application with Java EE 5 and NetBeans. He's using a nightly build from May 10th. I'm not sure if it's a nightly build of NetBeans or Glassfish that he's using. The demo he showed is pretty cheesy. He added an "author" column to a table, added a property to an Entity bean and then added an input field to the UI. This was followed with a web services demo and an Ajax demo. The Ajax demo was kinda cool - NetBeans allows you to drag and drop JSF components into a page. It drops in code rather than using a WYSIWYG view. I'm not sure if a WYSIWYG view is an option, as they didn't demo or mention anything.

Today Sun is donating their Java Message System (JMS) and NetBeans Enterprise Pack (UML, collaboration, etc.) to the open source community.

Craig McClanahan is on stage, He's got a slide with Duke holding a beer stein. The beer stein, and the Sierra Nevada that Craig pulled out are to represent the real reason we're here: The Beer. Craig is doing a demo with Java Studio Creator and creating a Pub Locator application that utilizes built-in GoogleMaps components. Craig deployed and showed a demo locating all the pubs near Moscone center. Then he turned "boss mode" on and clicked on a link to the Thirsty Bear. This took him to the new Java Ajax portal at developers.sun.com/ajax. Craig's demo was followed with a demo of the new Pet Store - with Ajax/Dojo enhancements.

Sun will be donating Java Studio Creator to open source (at netbeans.org) in the near future. In case you're not aware, Sun has recently released a number of other products on netbeans.org: NetBeans Profiler, NetBeans Mobility Pack, NetBeans Matisse.

Now there's a guy from Microsoft on stage talking about .NET and Java EE 5 interoperability. There's a "Tango" project that has a runtime that provides the interoperability between platforms. Now they're doing a demo with NetBeans 5.5 and its BPEL engine; all running on Open ESB. They demonstrating using WFC and Vista on the Windows side to connect to a web service on the GlassFish side. The Tango project has been renamed to Web Services Intererability Technology (WSIT) and is available on java.net at http://wsit.dev.java.net.

There's some new guys on stage now and they're talking about "Simplified SOA" with NetBeans Enterprise Pack using BPEL. While the BPEL tools in NetBeans look cool, they're definitely starting to lose the audience; people have started streaming out of the auditorium. More open source contributions: BPEL Engine into Open ESB and Sun Java System Portal Server.

Big Announcement: all of the technologies mentioned today will be under the umbrella of the OpenJava EE project.

Richard Blair (Swing Engineer from Sun) and Romain Guy have come on stage to demonstrate a Java SE Swing Web 2.0 Mashup. The demo uses Mustang and starts with showing a Swing client that connects to Flickr and allows you to browse photos. The slideshow feature is very cool and allows you to do 3d rendering and angling of images. It's one of the slickest-looking desktop apps I've ever seen. After showing the photo feature, they're showing how you can integrate this will a Google Map-looking service to show pictures on a map. All of the components in this demonstration are open source or simply customized Swing components. They ended the demo with showing a preview feature. The preview creates an applet that runs in a web browser (even when you're disconnected) and draws Roman's trip on a map, playing music and fading in pictures as the trip progresses. I was blown away at this point and would love to get my hands on this application. Hopefully it will be made available online, or maybe as a Flash movie?

There you have it folks. Sun is going to open source Java, just like I predicted a couple of weeks ago. It's not a matter of when, it's a matter of how.