Saturday, June 6, 2009

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Friday (Day 4)


Related Posts so far:
  • Day 0: CommunityOne, GlassFish
  • Day 1: JavaOne, Key Note
  • Day 2: JavaOne, Mobility
  • Day 3: JavaOne, Microsoft and IBM
=== The Toy Show hosted by James Gosling! ===
Welcome back, the final day has come and it's called "Toy Show Time" !

The whole show is not about standards or technical details, it is about Java, the Java ecosystem and how Java is used in its various situations driven by innovative people around the world:
  • The BlueJ team received a well-deserved special recognition for building tools that help millions of high school and college students get started with Java.
  • A fellow from RuneScape dev demoed their tools, and I learned how one animates a water troll, something that will surely come in handy one day.


  • JavaFX Demo with inversed Nintendo Wii Remote Control. See BOF descriptions in my last post. Instead of virtually painting on the wall, they used a piece of glass and it therefore looked like a scene of Minority Report :-)


  • Tor Norbye (a JavaPosse member) showed a very impressive JavaFX authoring tool whose release is planned in December. When JavaFX was presented the first time at JavaOne 2007 it looked good already but nothing really happened after that announcement. In 2008 it was pushed again but it did not kick off (again). Since the release of Java SE 6 Update 10 and this year's JavaOne, it is now really looking much much better! The demos of the upcoming JavaFX version by end of this year looked even better!! Together with Larry's indication to heavily push JavaFX forward, it might soon be a valid competitor of Flex and Silverlight.


  • There was a demo by the high school kids who won the FIRST robotics contest. Sun and the FIRST folks just ported the programming environment from C/C++ to Java.


  • The Grameen Foundation showed off an open source system for helping with microfinance in third world countries.
  • A fellow showed SIM cards running Java and a web server. The latest ones can interact with sensors and WiFi radios.
  • At the age of 14, James Gosling was working on some satellite ground station application running on a PDP-8... as of James, it had less compute power than a modern smart card :-) His mother took this photo by then:


    He was very excited to have on stage a guy showing a top-notch cutting-edge version of a satellite ground station management application used today and running fully on Java using over 1000 OSGi modules.

  • Two Hungarian university students showed off the project that won them first price in the Ricoh Printer Contest. Those printer/copiers are Java-powered and the students used them to grade multiple choice exams.
  • Atlassian wins Duke's Choice Award for Clover!


  • Another interesting guest was Visuvi: Not only can you upload (cell phone cam or hi-res) images to their search engine and have them analyzed (e.g. to answer the question "who painted that?"), but most importantly, the new image analysis technology is used for cancer research (e.g. you can search through a biopsy image database for visually similar cases). The database currently stores about 50 million images whereas a high-resolution image hold 3000 Mega Pixels and is about 60 GB !!!


  • A musician showed off a Java-powered juke box that allows independent artists to upload their creations to a web site and have it played in bars. As James put it: “Here's Manuel. He is a musician. He has a problem.”And with the help of a touch screen, a cash reader, and Java FX, he put together a solution. James had to insert a 1$ bill in order to run the demo :-) He said: "1$ for a starving musician"...


  • "Project Bixby" controls an Audi TT on a dirt rallye course going really fast (160 km/h) without a driver! This was very impressive...




  • And finally, the“LincVolt” project controls a 1959 Lincoln Continental with an electric motor, this time with a human driver: Neil Young! There is a Swing-based control panel in the car and while driving around, people can follow the data on the website. Fancy stuff... If I'm right, the car can produce 500 horse power !?
=== Technical Sessions ===
I'm still suffering from this week's firehose of information! It is again 2:35am... there will be only the titles of visited technical sessions without any comments. Sorry!
  • JCA 1.6 (by the two spec leads): most important take away: in addition to security context outflow there is now also security context inflow -> JCA 1.6 provides E2E security context propagation!
  • Google Guice (by Jesse Wilson)
  • Async with SCA (Apache Toscany)
  • JMS: Performance vs Reliability


=== Bye Bye San Francisco ===
After the last session (5.10pm) we had early dinner at the Chieftain Irish Pub. After that I headed back to hotel for writing the two posts (yesterday and today).

On the way to the pub we spotted these here...


Finally in the Pub: Anchor Steams... aaaah


At 9.30pm, we had a quick walk around block to take some photoshoots of SF by night:

Bye bye JavaOne, Hello WWDC!












This year's JavaOne was one of the best so far, not only due to the strong focus on Java EE 6 but also because of having talked to so many people, spec leads, experts and other visitors...
As said, time passed by so quickly, it's quite a shock realizing that all this is already over again...

Looking forward to bring back lots of infos, impressions and ... gadgets back to Switzerland!

CU soon
- Balz

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Fantastic, thanks for posting! Claus