JavaOne, DayFour
Originally posted 2005-06-30 14:10:19
Last day. I woke up at 4:30 AM, packed my bags, read awhile, then headed to breakfast: pancakes at Mel’s Diner.
The General Session belonged to James Gosling. He was wearing . . . drumroll, please . . . a T-shirt and jeans. His T-shirt sported Duke playing an electric guitar. He actually didn’t say much, but invited various folks up to the stage to show off things.
The first person showed off some of the new features in the latest development build of NetBeans, including a GUI Builder that has Xcode-like popup guidelines and snap-to behavior. He built a music player in just a few minutes. Admittedly, what he did was drag-and-drop prefabricated components onto a form, but it was slick. The components came from a java.net project called joplin.
I want to like NetBeans. I really do. The demo was impressive. So, during the talk, I pulled the joplin code from CVS, fired up NetBeans 4.1, and tried to bring up a source file. I got a scary error that I’d corrupted the form data. Then NetBeans crashed. I relaunched it, and got an error on startup. Then NetBeans crashed again. For some reason, I just can’t perform the incantations to get NetBeans to run more than a few minutes without crashing. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I just can’t put any time into it. So, I brought up the joplin project in Eclipse 3.1 (just released–yay!), and launched it without incident.
A few more projects paraded across the stage, none of which captured my attention. Then, the final contestant in the T-shirt hurling contest strutted their stuff, and then some (Sun-bigwig) talking heads had a discussion panel that focused on the future. One speculated that Google will some day have robots wandering around, taking pictures of everything. Much of the comments centered on robotics.
I couldn’t find the room for the annotations session, so I ducked into the closest room: The Apache Harmony project. A heckler showed up to compare Harmony to Microsoft’s extend-embrace-extinguish approach to Java.
I grabbed my sack lunch and bolted for a session on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Eclipse 3.1 has advanced the RCP state. For example, you can use Java Web Start to launch an RCP application. The title of this session began, \”Introduction to . . .\” and indeed it was.
After this session, I went to a session on DTrace, the new dynamic tracing utility in Solaris 10. Antithetical to Bob and Ray’s \”Slow Talkers of America\”, the presenter (a member of the Sun Kernel team) seemed to be auditioning for a post as an auctioneer. The technology looks amazing, affording sysadmins the opportunity to trace the state of a production system, without affecting performance, and drilling in to deeper and deeper levels of data. This presentation did not use a Windows laptop–it used a Ferrari-red laptop running Solaris 10.
I’m done. No more sessions. Nothing left looks interesting. We’re going to spend the afternoon at Fisherman’s Wharf, eating crabcakes and eyeing Alcatraz, and we fly back late this evening.
My takeaways from the conference:
- Every open-source project beckoned for help. \”Get involved!\” they all pled. I think I’ll look for more opportunities to get involved.
- I hadn’t paid much attention to the java.net web site. I think I’ll pay more.
- The web application I’m currently employed to work on doesn’t use any web framework–its origins pre-date the advent of web frameworks, or at least their mainstream usage. I plan to sell both management and the development team on Spring, JavaServer Faces, and AJAX, and figure out how to transition in that direction.
- Java continues to be a powerful force in the software development community, and continues to attract a lot of bright people!