James Gosling Hosts the Toy Show

James Gosling's annual whirlwind toy show at the JavaOne conference did not disappoint -- it displayed not only technical excellence and innovation, but excellence in generating technology that serves humanity. The event was well attended, and the audience was enthusiastic as ever.

James Gosling

Terracotta

First, Duke's Choice award winner Ari Zilka, founder of Terracotta took the stage. Terracotta provides an inexpensive and easy way to scale Java technology-based applications to as many computers as needed for simultaneous high availability and scalability, reducing operational and capital costs in supporting web applications. Terracotta 3.0 is in use across numerous markets such as travel, gaming, financial services, communications, health services, and social networking.

"Terracotta enables developers to take whatever application they're using and scale it in a simple manner," said Gosling. "Our Java Hotspot engineers have worked a lot with Terracotta and the guys there really know the deep dark secrets of the JVM* about as well as anyone."

Atlassian

Atlassian's Brendan Humphreys came next. "You guys have contributed JIRA and Confluence and now another stunning product, Clover," said Gosling.

Atlassian's Clover is designed to make testing easier by helping developers determine which tests are addressing which parts of an application. This leads to faster feedback and quicker and easier test runs, something much needed in continuous integration environments.

BlueJ

Next up were three members of the BlueJ project: Ian Utting, Poul Henriksen, and Davin McCall.

BlueJ is a Sun-supported project at Deakin University, Australia, and the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. It has a stunning record of helping people learn to program. An estimated 1 million people have learned from BlueJ, with use in 1000 universities worldwide and in middle and high schools and elementary schools all over the world. Looking out into the crowd, Gosling told the audience, "This is where your future employees come from."

Runescape

Mark Gerhard, CEO of Jagex, Ltd. was next on the bill. He gave the audience a look at the tools behind the video game Runescape. The game has a user base of 150 million and was on display on Tuesday's general session, where Gerhard accepted a Duke's Choice innovation award. The emphasis today was on a video that displayed how easy it is to build a character and drop it into Runescape.

Jagex uses 20 servers to serve 10 million active users and 175 million total accounts, with an IT staff consisting of three people. "We have another 400 guys in the office creating the content," explained Gerhard. "That's where we want to put our energy, rather than focusing on running the infrastructure."

Simon Ritter and Angela Caicedo

In the spirit of fun, Gosling invited Sun technology evangelists Simon Ritter and Angela Caicedo onstage to demonstrate how JavaFX technology can be used in conjunction with Java code to drive calculations and communicate with other devices.

First, Ritter used JavaFX to take the remote control of a Nintendo Wii and mount it with a projector that was tracking an object using an infrared camera -- all to create interesting effects. He took a slab of wood, and by using LEDs, a remote control JSR API to get BlueTooth into a laptop, and JavaFX providing information for the screen, he turned it on and an animation of a playing card appeared. As he turned the slab of wood over, the back of the playing card appeared.

Ritter insisted that there was a practical application for his creation. So he next projected an hourglass onto the wood, then turned the wood piece upside-down, and the hourglass turned over and dropped sand in the opposite direction.

Next, Angela Caicedo talked about how she sought to create a drawing tool to give her one-year-old daughter an alternative to drawing in crayon all over the walls of her house. Wearing a glove with an infrared LED to track her hand movements, Caicedo began to draw on a pane of frosted glass. Using the JavaFX interface, she illustrated various effects such as using a color palette -- very cool stuff.

"I imagine that after seeing this, lots of people will go to a hardware store, buy a sheet of frosted glass, and have some fun," observed Gosling.

Ritter closed with the observation that JavaFX is intended for all of the screens of your life, including those that you don't yet know exist.

Tor Norbye

Senior Sun engineer and Java Rock Star Tor Norbye came onstage to considerable applause to do a fast deep dive into a JavaFX designer tool. He demonstrated key framing, visual wiring and multiscreen development. The demo was a crowd pleaser.

Telenor -- Project PlaySIm

Fritjof Bogner Engelhardtsen, a researcher for Telenor ASA R&L, was next up to discuss Project PlaySIM. His central message was that next-generation SIM cards will have Java Card 3.0 technology, leading to a lot of advanced applications in a wide variety of mobile devices.

In addition, the open-source Project PlaySIM is working on a Sun SPOT "daughter card" and a GSM Module Sun SPOT daughter card.

In the future, look for SIM cards and Java Card 3.0 to make their appearance in embedded sensors, mobile phones, and technologies as yet unimagined.

FIRST Robotic Competition

Brad Miller, an associate professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Derek White of Sun Labs came onstage to discuss the FIRST Robotic Competition, wherein high school students, mentored by developers, receive a robotics kit consisting of parts and a video, and are shown a game to compete in. They have six weeks to get ready for competition.

For 2009, the game involved launching "moon rocks" (balls) into other robot containers. The competition filled the Georgia Superdome as dozens of competitors fought it out. The winners were students from Mountain View, California, who appeared onstage along with their robots.

The contest was part of the First Organization, whose stated goal is to "transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes."

Derek White has worked with Miller so that the 2010 competition will include writing the programs using Java technology. Miller received a Duke's Choice award for his work.

Sven Reimer of ND SatCom

Next, Sven Reimer, system engineer and software architect at ND SatCom, received a Duke's Choice award. Gosling remarked that Reimer's work was close to his heart because his first job as a teenager involved writing software for a satellite ground station using technology that is stunningly primitive by today's standards.

"Forty years later, we've gone through 20 cranks of Moore's law," said Gosling. "The computer I was using had less power than you find on a Java smart card today."

Reimar demonstrated a world map showing a model of readily available information gathered from satellite-monitoring technology that relied on NetBeans plug-ins with Java 2D renderings, with more than 1000 modules running inside of the application. Gosling joked that for some strange reason, the grumpy people in charge of the satellites would not provide live renderings of their data.

Chris Boone, Visuvi -- Image Searching

Chris Boone, CEO and president of Visuvi, demonstrated the enormous usefulness of Java EE technology as a visual search engine with the potential to make it cheaper and easier to diagnose cancer.

Displaying an actual biopsy image of prostate cancer, Boone explained how it was possible to analyze the content of the image to a degree far beyond what the human eye can see and to compare it with huge numbers of relevantly similar specimens along multiple dimensions, allowing more accurate predictions about outcomes.

Currently, one in six men are diagnosed with prostate cancer, oncology tests cost $6000, and oncologists agree only 60 percent of the time about the malignancy of biopsies -- serious obstacles stand in the way of effective early diagnosis, which is essential to surviving any cancer.

As analysis is made more fine grained, diagnosis will become more objective, easier to make, and less expensive. Boone demonstrated a search that went through 90,000 images in 0.3 seconds to assess whether a particular biopsy was cancerous. Sadly, it was.

Gosling, obviously impressed with the importance of the work, concluded, "I suspect that more than a few people in this room will live a few extra years because of you guys."

Microfinancing Through Java EE Technology

Gosling next introduced a group whose great innovation with Java technology was social and not technical. Sam Birney, engineering manager and Mifos alumnus, and Van Mittal-Hankle, senior software engineer at the Grameen Foundation, took the stage to receive Duke's Choice awards for their work using Java EE to serve 60,000 clients worldwide in microfinancing, a highly successful means of helping poor people get small loans and start businesses.

Mifos is open-source technology for microfinance that is spearheaded by the Grameen Foundation.

"Sometimes excellence comes not from technical innovation but in how technology is used," explained Gosling. "This is an example of using Java technology to really improve people's lives."

With an estimated 1.6 billion people left in the world who could benefit from microfinance, the men put out a call for volunteers to contribute to the Mifos project.

The Java Jukebox

The CEO of Check1TWO.com, Manuel Tijerino, who described himself as more of a musician than a developer, next appeared to talk about the Check1Twojukebox, which would allow struggling musicians to upload their music and get play on jukeboxes in bars. Written in JavaFX technology on the Solaris OS, it allows listeners to type in a track, album, or artist and download the music. Tijerino demonstrated the software on a box.

The jukebox has a touch screen and cache server that is relatively simple to build.

Programmable Printers

Zoltán Szabó and Balázs Lájer, students from the University of Pannionia in Hungary and winners of a Ricoh printer student contest, demonstrated software that enables a printer to rapidly grade exams, thus reducing the drudgery of of grading papers and a boon to teachers everywhere.

Project Bixby: Cars That Drive Themselves

Marcial Hernandez, senior engineer at Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab and Stanford University, and Greg Bollella, Distinguished Engineer at Sun and Real-Time Java expert, came onstage to talk about Project Bixby. The project involves self-driving cars that are not quite ready for prime time, owing to safety concerns.

They presented a video of a person riding in the car hands-free but prepared to touch the wheel if necessary as it went around a track. The goal is to let an Audi drive itself at maximum speeds. Relying on Java technology and the Solaris OS, the system is approximating but has not yet reached levels of safety. The Audi uses Java RTS 2.1 as an execution environment for the controllers.

The first-drive public presentation is scheduled for October 2009 at the opening of the new Volkswagen-sponsored building for the Stanford CarLab on the Stanford University campus.

Neil Young's Electric '59 Lincoln Continental: LincVolt

Finally, Paul Perrone, the founder, CEO, and chief software geek of Perrone Robotics, Inc.; automotive engineer Jonathon Goodwin; and Larry Johnson, the manager for singer-songwriter Neil Young, were shown in a video interacting with Gosling and displaying Young's 1959 Lincoln Continental with a hydroelectric engine and transmission -- the LincVolt. Gosling expressed amazement that they had preserved the look and feel of a Lincoln in a car that is energy efficient.

Perrone was awarded a special golden lifetime Duke's Choice award for his many contributions and innovative uses of Java technology.

If you missed the live webcast, you can watch the video replay on the JavaOne conference site.

Gosling closed the morning's session by repeating that the JavaOne conference toy show exists to inspire Java developers to use their ingenuity in novel ways to serve both themselves and the world.

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^* As used on this web site, the terms "Java Virtual Machine" and "JVM" mean a virtual machine for the Java platform.

» Watch the Video Replay: James Gosling's Toy Show
» View Toy Show Photos
» 2009 JavaOne Conference Wrap-Up: A Solid Show
» Duke's Choice Awards Winners for 2009
» Terracotta
» Atlassian Clover
» BlueJ
» Jagex, Ltd.
» JavaFX
» Project PlaySIM
» FIRST Robotic Competition
» Mifos
» Check1TWO.com

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