Todd Costella

Java One 2009 – What I’m Looking Forward to

Posted on 17. Apr, 2009 by todd in Java, groovy

I’ll be heading to San Francisco in the first week of June for the 2009 edition of Java One. I’ve been fortunate to attend something like eight or nine years and find it interesting to see the trends and how things like the economy affect attendance and the type of folks that come.

Java FX

I’m sure this year will be all about the Desktop (again) with Java FX. I’m mildly interested to see what all the hype is about. I’ve been a Swing guy for most of my Java life and while I am excited about seeing some of the new shiny tools and techniques (Scene Graph being very high up there), part of me is sad to see so much engineering time and resources being focused on this. Amy Fowler is doing a session entitled Extreme GUI Makeover (Hybrid Swing and JavaFX™ Technology) which promises to be a Pimp my Swing App with Java/FX.

Groovy

I first learned about Groovy at Java One in 2004 where James Strachan gave an introduction and overview of the language. This was the first time I had considered using anything else except for Java on the JVM and I remember having one of those ‘light bulb’ moments in the session. It’s totally changed the way I think about the JVM and languages in general. We’re a pretty heavy user of groovy in our application and I’m quite excited to see a number of Groovy sessions at Java One this year.

Some of the sessions that have caught my eye are:
What’s New in Groovy 1.6? with Guillaume Laforge
Griffon in Depth with Danno Ferrin and James Williams
“Design Patterns” for Dynamic Languages on the JVM™ Machine with Neal Ford
The Groovy and Grails BOF: With Live Grails Podcast Recording! with Sven Haiges and Glen Smith of The Grails Podcast

Java EE

Not nearly as sexy as Java/FX, the Java EE space will probably see some new announcements and updates on some of the key JSRs. I haven’t really been following the progress of the JCP that closely and can usually get all I need to satisfy my curiosity at Java One.

Summary

I’m really looking forward to it. San Francisco is one of my favorite cities and having been there a few times I’m starting to have a few favorite haunts including a new one I found last year. If you’re going to Java One this year, drop me a note on Twitter.