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Compatibility and Community Matters! by Dana Nourie This morning, the first General Session opened to a live band playing below one of the huge screens. On the biggest screen, developers could see close-ups of the band, and the energy was palpable as people filed in, eager to hear industry visionaries and announcements about the latest in Java technologies. As in past years, the session was as replete with humor as it was with announcements and demonstrations. All of the speakers seemed comfortable, enthusiastic, and eager to show the power of the Java platforms. And all of the demos worked without a hitch. John Gage, Chief Researcher and Vice President, Science Office, who has been an entertaining speaker at past JavaOne conferences, took the stage again this year, welcoming the large audience, and explaining the success of Java technologies over the past eleven years. In this year's JavaOne conference, developers can learn from labs, birds-of-a-feather, and a whopping 188 sessions. After explaining the usefulness and necessity of Schedule Builder, and making a few jokes about his experience with it, John emphasized, "Don't be shy!" and encouraged attendees to get to meet and know others at the conference, over lunch, in line. The future of the Java platform is defined by the community. Throughout the conference, the following messages were repeated by all of the speakers:
Next, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of Sun Microsystems, took the "pickle" as he called it, the microphone, and announced that he is now #1 Chief Java Evangelist. As such, he encouraged everyone to join the JCP, which currently has 1,052 members and should have many more. From there, he introduced several industry leaders, such as Ed Zander, Chairman and CEO of Motorola. More than 200 million Motorola Java phones are purchased each year, outselling the PC platform. He emphasized that because of the importance of Java technologies for mobility, the Java platform must stay unified, platform independent, and secure. In addition, the Motorola development platform supports NetBeans. Schwartz then presented Ed with a 2006 Duke's Choice Award: Best Music Phone Device. Schwartz re-introduced Rich Green, EVP, Sun Software. Rich has returned to Sun after two years, and Schwartz put him on the spot immediately with one of the most popular questions in the industry: "Will Sun open source Java?" Rich laughed uncomfortably, then took a serious tone, "It's not a question of whether, but how." Schwartz had Green repeat his answer to be certain all heard. How that open sourcing of the Java platform happens has yet to be planned, and Green says that those details will be his challenge to figure out. Stay tuned! Green then changed to his message, "Compatibility Matters!" With that in mind, he brought Jeff Jackson, SVP, Java Enterprise Platforms and Developer Products, to the stage to make several tools announcements, and to introduce five impressive demonstrations. Jeff emphasized that in addition to compatibility importance, that "Community Matters," and in a big way. All of the projects he introduced were based on these concepts, with commitment to the future. The Major Themes in Java EE Development Ease of development: The Java EE platform has been revamped in its programming model, has added EJB 3.0 support for POJOs, a new Java Persistence API, simplified SOA implementation, Web 2.0 with AJAX, annotations, and is supported by NetBeans Enterprise Developer Pack 5.5. "Java EE is here. It's now, done, so use it," says Jackson. "Download it today and begin using this great new software in your production environment." To demonstrate the ease of use in the Java EE platform, Jeff introduced Jeet Kaul, Executive Director, who brought up a nifty blog server, which had been built in the GlassFish community. He showed how you can build a blog application in less than fifteen minutes. In NetBeans 5.5, Jeet added a comments box, then quickly added a place for the author to input his name. As he did this, he inserted some humor with the line, "Demo worked--Jeet needs a raise!" This elicited a hearty laugh from the audience and a roll of Jeff's eyes. Lastly, Jeet illustrated the ease and beauty of adding features and hooking up web services using JavaServer Faces (JSF) technologies. Project GlassFish simplifies Java application development for Java EE 5 technologies, and includes Java Web Services Developer Pack, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB 3.0), JavaServer Faces (JSF 1.2), JAX-WS and JAX-B 2.0, support for twenty frameworks and applications, an open source CDDL license, and basis for the Sun Java System Application Server PE 9. GlassFish is free for download and deployment, with over 1,200 members in its community, and over 235,000 downloads. In addition, GlassFish is integrated with NetBeans 5.5. An especially interesting and entertaining demo was an application created in Sun Java Studio Creator 2 to use Google Map to locate good beer places in the area, with an "escape hatch." In addition to locating all the great beer bars, the escape hatch instantly brought up the http://developers.sun.com/ajax/ web site at the click of a button "in case the boss walks by." Contribute to GlassFish by going to https://glassfish.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectMembershipRequest. Next, we had a return of the Java Pet Store demo by Greg Murray and Craig McClanahan, which demonstrated the wonderful features of JSF technology in a rich web development environment with Sun Java Studio Creator 2 and AJAX. Jeff jokingly said, "But the parrot is long dead. What's the Pet Store doing back?" The new Pet Store makes use of Ajax seamlessly in Sun Java Studio Creator 2, which is also going open source. The Project Tango .Net Interoperability demo showed next generation web services technologies, enabling interoperability between Sun's Java products and Windows environments supporting Windows Communications Foundation (WCF). The contribution developers can make is to Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT). The last demo was of a photo sharing editor, which also included a map of the traveler who took the photos, which included 3D components. The application was smooth, elegantly designed, and ran without the performance issues of old Swing applications. Throughout Jeff's talk and team demos, he emphasized Calls to Action for the audience:
New Projects available in Open Source
...and more! John Gage wrapped up the session with reminders to use Scheduler Builder to its full advantage, and tips on how to find conference updates in the JavaOne Today newspaper. In all, it was an entertaining and educational session. | |||
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