The JavaOne Conference Rolls Along

Welcome to Day 2 of the 2009 JavaOne conference in sunny and somewhat cool San Francisco. And for those of you who are wondering where the newspaper from last year went, well, let's just say that we made the mistake of outsourcing it to the big three U.S. automakers.

First, the good stuff. I think everyone was a little surprised to see Larry Ellison appear at the Day 1 general session. At least several of the photographers were. It was neat to see him in person -- after all, I think he's the fourth richest person in the world -- and you could tell that the Java community was thankful for the words of reassurance that he gave, including a rather innovative idea of mixing JavaFX technology and OpenOffice.

And of course, we all gave Scott McNealy a standing ovation for all the work that he did with James Gosling to make Java technology a reality. The 2D-animated "Gospel According to Gosling" also drew some big laughs. If you missed this general session, you can catch the highlights on channelsun.sun.com, read the article by Rick Palkovic, or take a look at the images on photos.sun.com.

Yesterday, I got a chance to see one of the Sun Cloud presentations. The new Sun storage center is almost ready to go, and we saw some impressive demos on the innovative software that's being written around the Sun Cloud. One of the more noteworthy bits of information is that the Sun Cloud can support the WebDAV protocol, so it's pretty easy to set up a shared "network drive" in most major operating systems. This should make it easy to have online storage and possibly automated backup to the cloud very soon.

Also on Tuesday, I had a chance to attend the latest talk on Introduction to the JavaFX Programming Language (TS-5576), about which I've written a separate article. Sun developer Stuart Marks did a nice job, quickly highlighting some of the best features of the new JavaFX programming language.

Of course, as a client-side programmer who has seen enough variations of model-view-controller (MVC) over the past 10 years to write a dissertation, I still think the coolest feature is the ability to bind one variable to the value of another. But there are other nifty JavaFX features as well, including sequences -- think built-in arrays that have a ton of Collections functionality -- and keyframe-based animations for making cool graphical effects.

Also, did you notice the new "mixin" keyword that made its debut in JavaFX 1.2? Java developers who are familiar with interfaces will get the basic idea of how to use mixin classes, although mixins can contain both fully defined functions and variables, unlike Java interfaces.

By the way, I did notice that the social-networking crowd is pretty prevalent at this year's JavaOne conference. For those of you searching on Twitter, the hashtag is of course #javaone. But there are other hashtags, including #JavaEE, #JavaSE, #JavaME, #j1pavilion (note: that's pavilion with one letter L, not two), and even #j1afterdark if you want up-to-the-second updates on the various items that are taking place this week.

Day 2 is mobility day here at the JavaOne conference, so don't be surprised to see all sorts of portable devices that run Java or JavaFX technology being highlighted. Personally, I can't wait to see the latest gadgets in today's general sessions, including media players and cell phones. I also heard great things about some of the Java University courses that are going on this week as well -- there are times when I wish that I could sit down, relax, and learn from all the experts. But there are so many sessions to choose from and not enough hours in the day to catch them all.

So with that, I wish you a happy and productive Wednesday, and I'll see you in the halls of the Moscone Center. And of course, I'll be back tomorrow for another Daily Prompt.

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