As he kicked off this year's general technical session, titled "Java-Centricity: 'Java Technology at the Hub of Your Digital Life,'" Sun Distinguished Engineer and chief technology officer for software, Bob Brewin, noted the central role that Java technology has played in rich Internet applications (RIAs), Brewin said that Java has been there all along. However, there's been a gap. "While Java is the ideal deployment platform, it hasn't been ideal for content authors and designers." Enter JavaFX technology, a development environment, runtime, and tool set based on Java technology but targeted to meet the needs of content creators and designers.
In this session, Roberto Chinicci and Danny Coward, the Sun platform leads for the Java EE and Java SE platforms, which form the underpinnings of JavaFX, highlighted what's new in their platforms. The last segment of the session highlighted several cool JavaFX-based demos.
What's New in the Java EE Platform?
Chinicci started his tour of the Java EE platform by looking at the major objective of the platform's current release, Java EE 5: ease of development. Features such as annotations simplified things for developers, dramatically reducing the need to code deployment descriptors. The good news is that the simplification theme will continue in the next release of the platform, Java EE 6, with features such as support for RESTful web services and a more extensive use of annotations across all the web APIs. Java EE 6 will also focus on rightsizing and flexibility.
By rightsizing, Chinicci meant reducing the ever-increasing size of the Java EE platform to something more manageable. This involves the introduction of profiles, that is, various types of Java EE technology packages, each one designed for a specific use.
Java EE 6 will also be a lot more flexible by adding extensibility points, making it easier to incorporate the large number of available open-source frameworks and libraries. This will make it easier for people to add technologies or other facilities on top of the Java EE platform. Chinnici pointed out that extensibility in the platform also means treating scripting languages such as Ruby as first-class citizens.
Two demos highlighted this part of the session. In one, GlassFish architect Jerome Dochez demonstrated how modularity makes GlassFish application server v3 much smaller than past versions -- as small as 98Kb -- and gives it a startup time of only about one second. In a second demo, Sun technology evangelist for web services Arun Gupta and Sun principal engineer Tor Norbye demonstrated GlassFish v3's support for multiple dynamic languages and frameworks such as Ruby, Groovy, Rails, and Grails.
What's New in the Java SE Platform?
Next, it was Danny Coward's turn to tell the Java SE platform story. Coward started by focusing on the strength of the current version, the Java SE 6 platform. He noted that there are currently over 7 million Java developers. Each month sees an average of 750,000 downloads of the Java Development Kit (JDK) and 48 million downloads of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
In a significant announcement for Linux developers, Coward announced that the JDK is now a core package in the Ubuntu distribution of Linux.
The Java SE 7 platform release is scheduled for mid-2009. Like Java EE 6, Java SE 7 will be modular. Coward announced a new JSR that will specify the interoperability between the module system in Java SE 7 and the OSGI bundling system. This will allow developers who create applications that use OSGI bundles to run them unmodified in JDK 7.
Java SE 7 will also support a raft of dynamic languages such as JRuby, JavaScript, and JavaFX Script. Coward said that an active community of Java SE 6 users has already brought over 200 languages to run on the virtual machine (VM). In Java SE 7, work is ongoing to make it easier for developers to write interpreters and compilers of other languages and also to speed up the execution of other languages.
And Java SE has given new life to applets. The Java SE 6 Update 10 runtime enables applets to run without waiting for the whole JRE to download. Also, Update 10's JRE is enabled for JavaFX technology. To underscore that Java FX tie-in, Sun engineers Ken Russell and Jasper Potts demonstrated some really cool applets coded in JavaFX Script and running on top of the Java SE 6 Update 10 JRE. What was particularly impressive is that these applets can be decoupled from the browser and seamlessly moved to the desktop.
Cool JavaFX Demos
Demos in the last part of the session underscored the strengths and potential of JavaFX technology. But before the demos, Brewin took the stage with Bill Joll, CEO of On2 Technologies, to announce that Sun and On2 have signed an agreement to incorporate On2's video codec into the Java runtime.
Here's a brief summary of the JavaFX demos:
- Parleys.com. This web-based rich Internet application created by the Belgian Java Users Group (BeJUG) is an excellent learning platform. Steffen Janssen, founder of the BeJUG and the BeJUG-sponsored conference JavaPolis, demonstrated a beta version of a new JavaFX-based version of Parleys.com, showing off an animated user interface.
- LiveConnect. Sun engineer Joshua Marinacci wrote this social mashup application. Marinacci demonstrated how simple it was to code LiveConnect, an application that brings together social feeds, media, and messages in a single rich graphical interface. And because it links into Java libraries, JavaFX makes it easy to add services to an application like this.
- JavaFX Collaboration. JavaFX technology promises to bring the world of the designer and developer closer together. Sun engineers Martin Brehofsky and Soraya Younossi demonstrated an implementation of this collaborative vision. Taking the designer's role, Younossi used tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to design the application's user interface. Then she was able to easily pass the components of the design to Brehofsky, who incorporated those assets into a JavaFX-based development tool.
- JavaFX Moon Tank. Running a multiplayer game called Moon Tank, Sun engineers Chris Oliver -- the originator of F3, which morphed into JavaFX technology -- and Anthony Rogers demonstrated some of the advanced animation, audio, and video effects that developers can produce relatively easily using JavaFX. Each player has a set of tanks that can fire projectiles at an opponent's tanks as they move around a geodesic dome-like moon.
Final Thoughts
I left this session feeling good about where Java technology is and where it's headed. I'm also looking forward to some of the new tools and features that will be unfolding under the JavaFX brand. Indeed, Java technology is and will continue to be the hub of everyone's digital life.
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