The Toy Show

On May 11, a wintry spring day in San Francisco, California, the final day of the 2007 JavaOne conference, from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m., father of Java technology James Gosling shared his toys with a packed audience of entertained developers in a series of demos that are better seen firsthand than described.

The demos moved from the mundane through the spectacular. Gosling and his guests showed off a dynamic tracing framework through grid engineering and development tools, on to Java software in video cameras, virtual workplaces, toy and industrial robots, Java software-guided submarines, and an autonomous helicopter.

For those end-of-the-week sleep-deprived Conference attendees who overslept and missed the morning session and for those with no time to view the webcast, here are brief summaries of Gosling's guided tour, which offered some of the best -- or at least most fun -- new Java implementations.

Gosling remarked on the plethora of interesting demos he'd seen and the great challenge of limiting the selection to fit within the session's time restrictions. Each demo illustrated the power of Java software as it enters new and inspiring spaces.

Project D-Light: The Power of Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) for Java Developers

The show began with Roman Shaposhnik, software manager in development tools engineering at Sun Microsystems, who took the stage to demo project D-Light, a performance analysis and observability tool that reveals the power of Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) for Java developers.

D-Light is a plug-in tool for Sun Studio software that will be available at the end of May and will eventually be a NetBeans module.

"It's like a personal forensic lab that tells you what is happening with your system," explained Shaposhnik, who spoke with remarkable speed and clarity. "You can see whether and how you are stressing your operating system and get details of what's read and written to disk."

Gosling noted the power of the tuning facilities. "This drills down to the interrupt drivers in the PCP stack," he commented. "And for high-end transaction processors, that kind of drill-down is really valuable."

He emphasized two key points: First, it currently runs only through Sun Studio. And second, the project is very young, so no disks will be publicly available until late May at the earliest.

Above all, said Gosling, Sun wants feedback: "If you really like something, tell us. And if you don't like something, tell us that also. And if you want a particular tool, let us know."

Sun Grid Engineering

Next, Rob Englander, senior staff engineer for grid engineering at Sun, showed the Sun Grid Compute utility. "If you have to do numerical calculations, this is a great toy," pronounced Gosling, "even if the actual toy is 2000 miles away." He characterized the Grid Compute utility as "like servlets for computing."

"Basically," commented Englander, "the Sun Grid application instruments your project with small details to do deployment of the app without going through wizards and forms, so you can get something running quickly."

He demo'ed a pricing service, with stock symbols, pricing, and historical data, used to compute options for pricing models. With a financial spreadsheet using StarOffice, plus client Java code, Englander could submit 33 stocks and information to the service on Sun Grid, break this up into 33 jobs, one for each stock, process the information, and stream back to the data sheet asynchronously.

Englander concluded his presentation by offering developers 200 GPU hours of free play time on the grid.

NetBeans IDE 6.0 Preview

Tor Norbye, senior staff engineer at Sun, offered a NetBeans 6.0 demo that revealed the continuing rapid improvements in the IDE.

The NetBeans IDE 6.0 Preview, Milestone 9, is now available, with some impressive highlights:

• Support for Ruby, JRuby, and Ruby on Rails
• A smarter and faster editor
• Improved Swing development (Swing data binding)
• Integrated profiling
• Integrated visual design for web applications
• A new integrated user interface for CLDC/MIDP and CDC development

The final NetBeans IDE 6.0 release is planned for November 2007. Norbye presented a mashup in which the IDE data mined a data base, retrieved metadata, created a class, and tied the pieces together.

NetBeans Ricoh

Sun's Petr Suchomel, of NetBeans mobility, and Greg Anderson, senior engineering manager at Ricoh Corporation, took the stage to demo NetBeans Ricoh, which highlights ways that NetBeans IDE innovations contribute to a whole new world of customized office solutions.

"You have a JVM* and write apps for the printer, control the printer, and can document-control whatever you want,"remarked Gosling. "You can customize the display, scan documents, and route them to the database while at the machine. And you don't have to go back to the machine to put in the metadata."

Suchomel took a photograph of Gosling, wrote three applications, downloaded them to the printer, and printed, all in a few minutes.

Gosling was quick to point out that the printer is not a demo but a product available from Ricoh. He also remarked, "Using developer tools, you can tie apps together and create synergies between entities on the network. The web browser is not tied to the laptop -- it can be anywhere."

Then Daniil Gordijenko, chief of operations for development, and Cyil Joui, chief developer of Ubiquitech, showed how a BlueTooth device could communicate with a printer without needing a large network.

Gosling emphasized that special devices with handheld pads and interfaces exist, offering particular value for the disabled.

Blu-ray: The DVD of the Future

Next, Danny Kaye, executive VP of technology strategy at Twentieth Century Fox; Zane Vella, president and cofounder of MX Entertainment; and Bernard Traversat, director of software advanced development at Sun, presented a Blu-ray demo.

A Blu-ray disc is a high-density optical disc format for the storage of digital media, including high-definition video. Java software is included in all Blu-ray Disc players as a mandatory part of the standard.

"Blu-ray," explained Kaye, "is the next-generation high-definition format that will replace DVD eventually. It currently has the highest resolution that a consumer can enjoy in their home theater. It offers the best immersive, interactive experience available. It can be authored directly on a disk with BDJ or can seamlessly integrate with the Internet through BD Live."

Kaye then called upon Java developers to create the breakthrough applications that would help the market explode. He demo'ed a range of functionality that included collecting particular content from a video, personal scene selection, online games interacting with film content, and an example of an extensive film database.

For the movie starring Russell Crowe, Master and Commander, in which a ship sails around the world, he demo'ed a pull-up map function that locates the ship geographically at any given time in the movie. Trivia tracks could enable viewers to call up relevant historical, geographical, and other information about any part of the world in a film.

Gosling remarked, "You could have an entire Wikipedia for Master and Commander."

The BD Live technology, which enables Internet interaction, is limited only by the power of the Internet and the human imagination. Consumers may look forward to networks of conversations about films that have been watched or to hookups with directors and actors as large audiences watch a film together on the Internet.

Quality Videos Through CineShot

Tad Frysinger and Steve Buck of Cinegistics next presented CineShot, touted as "a sophisticated software platform that is easy to use and provides the videographer the same results as dedicated hardware tools at a fraction of the cost."

CineShot's Java applications perform real-time analysis at 30 times per second and make preset adjustments in audio, lighting, exposure, focus, and other calibration challenges that would ordinarily require expensive hardware and software. The demo identified a host of common video problems and clarified the mechanisms by which Java software identified such problems and spontaneously adjusted for them according to preset parameters.

"This is a great product for video, with great Swing components," exclaimed Gosling. "It reinforces the idea that Java software is powerful in building high-end user interfaces. This is pretty cool."

Walking in a Virtual Wonderland

Paul Byrne, senior staff engineer CSG/CTO for advanced development at Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Sun Labs), took the stage to provide a taste of Project Wonderland, which provides a Java 3D virtual world that could change the nature of work, especially for telecommuters and distributed teams, who face the challenge of working together when geographically separate.

Byrne took the audience for a walk through virtual space through the eyes of an avatar, a virtual James Gosling, who ambled through an extensive virtual office space, with quality streaming video and endless possible additions to enhance communication.

Such a world, Byrne emphasized, provides lots of team space where team members can make all of a project's content available for collaboration. A team of developers could gather in the virtual world, display and hack code, share documents, and dialogue about it. The Darkstar Sun game server functions at the back end. Wonderland could be regarded as a form of game technology.

Sun Labs at MPK20: Sun's Virtual Workplace

Sun is making the effort to apply Wonderland to everyday life at Sun Labs MPK20, a virtual office building at the Sun Microsystems Menlo Park (MPK) campus. "You can notice today that Sun has people collaborating from all over the world, in every time zone," observed Gosling.

"For example, we have a great Russian team that is very vocal. Teleconferences just aren't the same as what the virtual world offers. I could also see educational institutions building simulations that teachers could use."

Almost everything in Wonderland is available for download today, except the audio, which will go up soon.

Java Technology -- From Meat Scales to ATMs

Next, Gosling observed the diverse places in which Java technology is showing up. "In Europe, Java code is wrapped in plastic and steel at ATMs," he observed. "There are endless possibilities from stamps to buying theater tickets at ATMs."

He pointed to a Hobart meat scale on display on the floor show that is fully networked to an inventory system. That way, store managers can know exactly what's selling. Enterprises can customize such technology to meet shifting needs.

Dancing Robosapiens

Davin Sufer, CTO of WowWee, and Sun's Bernard Traversat presented a show of dancing toy robots, RS Media, the latest "Robosapien" -- with the capacity to burp, speak, dance, and more.

Robosapien, also known as RS Media, is a toylike biomorphic robot designed by Mark Tilden and produced by WowWee. Robosapien's movements are preprogrammed but can also be controlled by an infrared remote control included with the toy, by a personal computer equipped with an infrared transmitter, or by an infrared transmitter-equipped PDA. Robosapien is advertised as "The robot that thinks it's a human!"

RS Media is customizable by way of a PC through the marvels of Java technology with LCD display, sensors, motors, accessible APIs, USB port, and other technology. The robots and developer kits have been on sale throughout the Conference, available only at the show.

Traversat staged a memorable scene of three Robosapiens dancing in unison to the song "I Will Survive."

The ABB Robot Arm: Greg Bollella

Next, Gosling introduced Sun Distinguished Engineer Greg Bollella, who demo'ed an industrial-strength robot arm that is clearly not a toy.

ABB of Sweden is known for having installed more than 150,000 robots worldwide, and this robot arm is the first Java technology-powered industrial robot. The robot arm proceeded to sketch out a picture based on a photo taken of Gosling. The motors driving the robot altered position at a rate of 1000 times per second, with Java software adjusting the voltage levels in creating the sketch.

"This is no trivial computation," said Gosling. "It involves a weird set of intersecting triangles. Drawing a straight line is one of the hardest things for a robot to do."

Next, the arm played a version of mumblety peg, a game in which people, after a few drinks, use a knife to carve out a drawing of their flattened hand on a table.

"If you don't spill any blood, then you haven't had enough to drink," quipped Gosling.

A sharp spike slowly traced the outline of the mold of a hand. "I was happy to use my own hand -- it's perfectly safe, but Sun's lawyers would not allow it," said Bollella. The robot arm traced the hand with unfailing precision.

Gosling gave a JavaOne Demo Hero Award to Bollella for the most hours of uninterrupted sleep, plus an award to Sun's Dave Hofert who, when a package needed for this demo failed to materialize in the mail from Sweden by overnight delivery, flew to Copenhagen, drove to Lund, Sweden, and returned to the U.S. with the package.

Swimming With SONIA

Next, David Mercier, Martin Morissette, Félix Pageau, François St-Amant, and Jean-François Im, undergraduate students at Montreal, Canada's École de technologie supérieure, went onstage to demonstrate SONIA.

SONIA is a robotic autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in a Java technology-based development environment, consistently ranked among the best in the world in recent years. In addition to the actual AUV, the team created a simulation environment using the Java 3D API.

The team, who receive no academic credit and no money for their work, built the AUV using the C programming language until 2003, with mediocre results. Once team members switched to Java software, they came to rank in the top three in the world in competitions run by the U.S. Navy in the last three years.

SONIA, which is preprogrammed for tasks and relies on sensors, navigates through an onboard driving system. SONIA can autonomously pass through a gate, detect a flashing light, find and connect with a docking station, locate a pipe and drop material into a bin -- all underwater and with no communication with the team.

SONIA relies on the following:

• A flexible architecture for data gathering, fusion, and decision systems
• Simulator using Java 3D API
• Telemetric interface managed by Java Management Extensions (JMX)
• Swing-based vision client to modify robotic vision parameters and algorithms on the fly
• Visual AI editor tool powered by JGraph

"I wish I had gone to school where you guys go," said Gosling. "You definitely deserve a lot of academic credit for this. It's great!"

To see Project SONIA's demo that was on display all week in the JavaOne Pavilion, see the YouTube video.

The Real-Time Helicopter

Finally, Paul Perrone from Perrone Robotics, known for his autonomous unmanned Java technology-powered vehicle, Tommy, brought a different toy to this year's Conference -- a small helicopter that "flew" across the stage above Gosling's and Perrone's heads.

"The helicopter builds a map of the terrain that it flies over and outputs a 3-D model of what it has seen," explained Perrone.

As they spoke, Perrone and Gosling ducked down as the sound of strafing machine guns filled the room. "This is a real helicopter and not exactly a toy," observed Gosling. "It requires a pilot license, so they don't let a software guy drive it."

Perrone explained that the helicopter has an embedded processor running a Real-Time Java system that gathers 15,000 range points at a time in a 3-D model. It rapidly inputs and correlates data.

Call to Action: Be Inspired!

Gosling closed with a call to action: "Just look at this stuff -- it's all over the map and touches things ranging from meat scales to cell phones to helicopters.

"My message is: Be inspired!"

See the webcast replay and check out all these fun demos yourself.
Project Wonderland
Sun Labs at MPK20: Sun's Virtual Workplace
Project Darkstar
Sun Studio
NetBeans IDE 6.0 Preview
Cinegistics