JavaOne 2007, DayThree
Originally posted 2007-05-11 07:14:01
I didn’t say, \”Hello Moto\” to today’s Motorola keynote–to many fires at work to take care of. In fact, 6:00 AM found me standing outside the hotel in my pajamas, trying to find a cell signal. The keynote was supposed to cover usable UIs on mobile screens, I believe. I wish they’d covered cell signals in hotels in downtown San Francisco.
I went to a session titled \”Assembling Ajax Apps with Power Tools,\” thinking they’d focus on development tools, not development libraries. I got it backwards. Presented by someone from ICESoft, purveyor of ICEFaces, the session really was a shill for ICEFaces. True, it walked through two other libraries first–jMaki and Dynamic Faces–and credibly explained them, but then finished with ICEFaces is better. I’m not sure yet, but they may be right. They offer drop-in, Ajax-ified components for JavaServer Faces.
I then went to a presentation on OSGi best practices, and realized that my knowledge of OSGi didn’t suffice for the material presented. I took good notes, though.
I then spent some time in the pavilion, talking to people about products and services from the downright disappointing to the compelling. I spent some time with the JBoss folks, talking about what it would take to migrate from WebSphere 5. I talked to the ICEFaces people. I talked to Talend about their ETL tools. I talked to Perforce, but just to get a stamp on my JDJ card. I talked to the Eclipse folks, but they really didn’t have much going on except for a CD with Eclipse 3.2.2 running on Apache Harmony. \”It runs pretty well,\” was their assertion. I’ve assumed that OpenJDK has eliminated the need for Apache Harmony, but Eclipse seems to be singing a different tune. I tried to talk to the JRuby guys, but the lines were too long. I went to the Oracle booth to get tchotchkes for our Oracle guys, but all they had were CDs. No pens. No pads. Not even a paperclip. They offered me a ticket to Spiderman 3, but I’ve seen it. I talked to No Magic about MagicDraw. I talked to Klocwork about their static OWASP analysis. I talked to Agitar about their test-generation software that now produces JUnit tests. I said hello to the Teamprise guys. I talked to Interface21 about Spring Batch and Spring WebFlow. I talked to some company that allows people to write reports in Word–I don’t remember the name, but I have a Data Sheet. I gathered a few tchotchkes for the K-Byte challenge we’re holding at work (write a program whose source is 1024 bytes or fewer). I learned some good stuff.
I signed up for sessions in a rush a couple of weeks ago. I knew the deadline loomed, and I worried I’d get stuck in uninteresting classes, and I didn’t make time to read the session abstracts–just the titles. Bad move. \”Ruby Tooling State of the Art\” sounded to me like a review of the best tools to use for writing Ruby code. This held great interest for me. Although I use Textmate on the Mac, I’ve casted about for both Linux and Windows tools for Ruby. I wobble among RadRails, JEdit, Visual SlickEdit, Vim, ConTEXT, UltraEdit, e, and Komodo Edit. As I’m sure the abstract explained, the session was about the state of the art for writing Ruby-aware editors. It was put on by the guys doing the Ruby stuff in NetBeans, so I guess I learned that I can try out NetBeans for Ruby. My eyes glazed over as they talked about the difficulties in doing code completion in a dynamically typed language. I learned a little bit about Ruby debugging (\”ruby -rdebug\” vs \”rdebug\”), but I felt so let down that I ignored the subtleties. Next year I’ll read the abstracts.
We stopped by the After Dark bash, and watched some of the BattleBots on the big screen. We never fully figured out the rules, but we did notice that each robot cost exactly $5,000. While we watched, SubZero seemed invincible. It had a quick-release, hydraulic, one-tined forklift that flipped competitors like hotcakes, and used same arm to right itself if it got flipped. Watching helmetted Segway drivers cautiously navigate orange cones almost put us to sleep, and bungie trampolining held no appeal. After seeing Grinder Girl strut her stuff, we’d had enough and slipped away.
In summary, today was not a good day for sessions, but was a terrific day for talking to vendors and discovering more of what we can be doing.