Friday's 2008 JavaOne Conference general session features Sun vice president James Gosling on "Extreme Innovation." As a prelude to the demos, Gosling leads a farewell tribute to Sun Microsystems' Chief Researcher John Gage, whose inspirational provocation will be sorely missed.
Also known as Gosling's annual toy show, the popular session showcases the best of the best in technology for the year. This year, Gosling plans to run through his personal top 10, and here they are, in random order.
During the show, the GemAlto-cosponsored Java Card programming contest winners will be announced. Contestants had to write a control algorithm (using Java code that could fit on a smart card) for a tank driving around a field with other tanks, with whoever outlasted the other tanks being the winner. Laurent Lagosanto, GemAlto's head of research, shows off the Java Card 3.0 card's Connected Edition.
Derek Mathieson of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), talks with Gosling about Java technology across CERN, starting with their Enterprise Java eBusiness system (EDH) that cuts across more than 50 business processes. In the scientific arena, Mathieson says, their Technical Infrastructure Monitoring application (TIM) "is all Java. A Swing application using JMS for communications, and Ilog Views for the rendering. This tool is used 24/7 in the control room to monitor the entire accelerator complex, and related systems." Their massive ATLAS system is 25 meters tall and weighs in at 7000 tonnes, with 100 million readout channels. In operation, there will be about 600 million collisions per second, generating 15 petabytes of information -- also managed with Java technology. It includes "an Event viewer written by the ATLAS developers with Java 3D to visualize the particle tracks," and is open source.
Figure 1: CERN's Open-Source GraXML 3D Event Viewer
Dr. Phil Christensen of the JMARS project will thrill the audience with shots of how they are mapping the surface of Mars using Java technology. The vehicle Opportunity Rover's tracks and Opportunity itself are shown near "Cape Verde." Meanwhile, maps showing Mars' elevation, hematite mineral deposits, chloride salt distribution, potential landing sites, and more amazing surface detail shots will be displayed.
Figure 2: The JMARS Project
And who could overlook Tommy Jr., the DARPA-winning autonomous modified 2004 Scion xB? Paul Perrone, CEO of Perrone Robotics, speaks with Gosling about Tommy Jr.'s internals, including the technology that runs it: Java Real-Time System, Java SE, Java ME, Sun SPOT, MAX Robotics Platform & Drivers, and MAX-UGV framework (navigation rules).
Greg Bollella, Sun Java Real-Time System distinguished engineer, shows off the project Sydney and Blue Wonder architectures. These leverage existing technology design, with minor modifications for industrial use. For example, they leveraged the stock Solaris 10 system and created one new driver for Profibus support. They also leveraged Java RTS 2.0 and added Java APIs for Profibus. (Greg Bollella and James Gosling got to share Thursday's dinner with the lucky winner of the RTS drawing on the Pavilion floor.)
Figure 3: Greg Bollella Pulls Out a Winning Ticket
The Pulse LiveScribe smart pen system demo features Pulse's Jim Marggraff. It will show how, as Marggraff speaks and writes notes on the special Pulse-enabled paper, the JVM-in-a-pen records both audio and handwriting. He can then tap on what he wrote to listen to the audio track, and can view, search, and share his notes on his computer.
Sentilla's CTO and co-founder Joe Polastre demonstrates the Sentilla Mote architecture with bouncing beach balls embedded with Motes. He then visualizes the trajectory of these balls on a Sentilla laptop.
Sun's Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos and Joshua Slack of NCsoft, Inc. lead the audience through Project Darkstar's APIs, engines, community, and commercial applications. Project Darkstar is Java technology-based infrastructure software designed for latency-critical, massively scaled online applications, such as online games.
Java Rock Star and Sun engineer Tor Norbye demonstrates the brand-new JavaScript editor based on the GSF framework (General Scripting Framework) that was introduced in the NetBeans 6.1 IDE. It took only a few months to provide many new JavaScript editing features, such as semantic highlighting, instant rename, and code completion and type analysis.
Tomas Hurka and Luis-Miguel Alventosa, Sun software engineers, discuss VisualVM's diagnostics and analysis tool. It integrates the features of several JDK tools (JPS, JInfo, JStack, JMap, and more), with a growing list of community plugins.
As always, Gosling and Gage invite the developer community to change the world. We know we can look forward to innovation in new arenas, as Java technology moves ever more pervasively through the four screens of our lives.
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