Java One 2009 – Day 1

Posted on 06. Jun, 2009 by todd in Java

General Session

  • Pretty typical of previous years. Billions of devices, millions of developers blah blah blah.
  • Java Store introduced. Strikes me a bit of me too wrt to the Apple App Store. No relevance for Entero.
  • Scott McNally and Larry Ellison talk about the future of the platform (with all sorts of caveats about future looking statements). Said most of the right things. Look to keep investment up in R&D plus continue with Java/FX. Cautiously optimistic here.
  • Lots of partner demos, nothing too exciting.

Deploying Java™ Technology to The Masses: How Sun Deploys The JavaFX™ Runtime

Good first session. Interesting to see that Sun has the same sort of problems as everyone else wrt deploying content to the desktop. There were a few good practical tips that I’ll want to dig into.

  • Pack200
  • JNLP additional tags.

Extreme Swing Debugging: The Fast and the Furious

This was an introduction to the java.net Swing Explorer project. This is a project that I’m familiar with but it was good to see the EDT violations feature as well as using the “Player” feature to find painting issues. It’s a great tool to have in your swing debugging arsenal.

Tuesday Afternoon Technical General Session

Extending Java™ Technology and Developing DSLs with the JetBrains MPS Open-Source Language Workbench

This was an interesting session for sure. The folks at JetBrains have a tool
they call Meta Programming System Workbench that is used for designing and working with domain specific languages. It built on the core IntelliJ platform and has a lot of really great features. I was thinking we could use it for embedding in our application for our users to build scripts initially. Longer term I’m thinking that implementing our formula pricing model in a DSL is the way to go but am still not sure about that. Regardless, this may be a tool that might make that easier.

  • Development environment for building domain specific languages
  • Handles compiling and parsing
  • Works directly on the AST

An Introduction to Complex Event Processing on the Java™ Platform

This is an area I know nothing about. Complex Event Processing deals with the query and visualization of huge data volumes. Real time systems for things like stock trades or perhaps data that comes from SCADA systems. There is a branch of Computer research that deals with this sort of volume. There is a query language called CQL that is like SQL but has a temporal component to the query language. It also has specific constructs for filtering and aggregation of massive datasets. This content was presented by Oracle/BEA where they touched on their product.

Toward a Renaissance VM

This was a fascinating session by John Rose and Brian Geotz of Sun. They dove into some of the very nasty problems that modern compiler writers are grappling with. The JVM hosts a number of languages and has for quite some time. JSR-292 (Supporting Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform) is the JSR under which this work is being done. I left this session feeling very humbled and grateful that there are some very smart guys working on new VM extensions that are going to make my life easier in the future.

Creating Java™ Technology-Based Applications for Mac OS X: Is It Cocoa or Is It Java Technology?

I love my Mac but am a little frustrated with Apple in the pace that they implement the JVM on OS/X. They are on 1.6 finally but Apple took a long time to get there. Regardless, there are a bunch of folks in the Java community that have stepped in to help making Java Swing apps on OS/X easier. In this session, Deane Richan from the Xito project spoke about a number of strategies for improving the integration of a Java Swing application on OS/X such that the swing app looks closer to a native OS/X application. Good session and a project I want to take a closer look at.

The Collections Connection (Gala Tenth Edition)

Josh Bloch, the creator of the Java collections library has been doing this Birds of a Feather Session for about 12 years (I think he missed a couple along the way which is why this is the tenth one). I’ve been to a bunch of them and always come away learning something new. Josh left Sun to work at Goggle a couple years ago. He is still very active in the Java community and continues to make huge contributions to the platform. This year he brought along a couple of his colleagues from Google; Martin Buchholz and Kevin Bourrillion. They spoke of a few things that might be coming in JDK7 but more interesting (from my point of view) is they also touched on the Google Collections package which adds a number of ‘missing’ collection implementations. It’s something I’ve wanted to take a look at for a while and even more so after hearing about some of the implementations in this framework.

Meet the Java Posse

Of course I’m going to pop in and see the guys do their third annual Podcast from Java One. It was a packed room and the fellows didn’t disappoint.

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