The actual report from JavaOne

Yesterday we held the presentation, report, at the JavaForum venue. Everything went quite well, I think. "We" are; Ove Nordström, Jonas Södergren, Mattias Holmqvist, Magnus Kastberg and myself.

Prior to our talk Jimmy Falkbjer, Jayway, talked about web services; how to start using WS etc. Informative and engaging. Erik Hellman, Sony Ericsson since three weeks, held a major crash course in closures for Java. Also, he gave a brief, but quite thorough, historic view of how closures emerged through time. Very interesting! (if you care about closures, please vote)

However, some collected details and highlights from JavaOne and the venue yesterday:
- JavaFX, almost same as last years JavaOne, but more developed, bigger and more stable. Well, the demos presented crashed all over the place but gave an overall cool impression; dragging a running application from a browser onto the desktop, closing the browser and the app continues running just like that.
- Java and Blue Ray; the formats battle is over - Blue Ray stands as the winner!
- Rock'n'Roll; Niel Young showed up on the first keynote giving credit to Java and Blue Ray.
- Glassfish modularized with a very small footprint, now able to run in a mobile unit.
- Java appearing in more places than before; Java RT in industrial automation, an area not yet penetrated by higher level of programming.
- The Livescibe Pen, pretty cool gadget! Has JavaME with some incredible applications. Ove has promised a demo on next JavaForum.
- Sentilla sensor nodes, also running JavaME and requires very small amounts of power. Also check out the SICS page about sensor networks.
- Java is used to run and monitor the accelerator complex at CERN; they do some pretty cool stuff, in the new detector (ATLAS) they will be detecting what happened just after Big Bang. It is pretty massive; 25 meters tall and weighs in at 7000 tonnes, with 100 million readout channels. When in operation, there will be about 600 million collisions per second, generating a whopping 15 petabytes of data, also managed with Java technology. This includes "an Event viewer written by the ATLAS developers with Java 3D to visualize the particle tracks", and it is open source.
- JMARS; NASA has produced a very impressive tool for mapping Mars and handling various geological data, Java technology in use. The amazing application showing Mars' elevation, hematite mineral deposits, chloride salt distribution, potential landing sites, and a large amount of surface detail shots.
- Tommy Jr., the DARPA-winning autonomous vehicle, Paul Perrone, CEO of Perrone Robotics, spoke with JAmes Gosling about Tommy Jr.'s internals, including the stuff that runs it: Java RT, Java SE, Java ME, Sun SPOT, MAX Robotics Platform & Drivers, and MAX-UGV framework (navigation rules).
- Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, and Joshua Slack of NCsoft showed Project Darkstar, engines, community, and commercial applications. Project Darkstar is Java technology-based infrastructure software designed for massively scaled online games.
- JavaCard 3.0, now includes a webserver. WS on a card! A robot competition was held running two JavaCard apps.

There was of course more to report. I'll leave it for now, but I might come back with more stuff when appropriate.

How was the conference? Well, as usual it was great. But the not that many news actually. What was news last year is now announced as being implemented. This is both good and bad; Java is becoming mainstream and thus things are stable, but on the other hand also becoming somewhat boring. Please misinterpret me correctly on this one. The latter should, in my opinion, be perceived as something good. The rate of innovation might have decreased, but those new things are more stable and feature rich. However, there are still ares where innovation is eminent.

One such area is the Java Programming Language itself. In order to survive (Erik's presentation yesterday) the language needs to evolve; in other words we need things to be added like closures.
On the other hand adding JSR-277 is in my opinion not progress. As Buckley said in his technical session (TS-5581), the language should be clean, leave it up to applications to be rich. What I am saying is that there is a more than sufficient module system in OSGi. One could argue, however, that there is no type safety with OSGi, but I think that will come with time. The R5 spec. is on its way. As there are numerous devices out there not yet on par with a level corresponding to Java SE 5 OSGi has to be without generics. Be patient, I am convinced that OSGi will be upgraded with generics in the near future.