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by Weiqi Gao.
Original Post: Larry Ellison: Committed To JavaFX
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It's been several days since I came back from JavaOne 2009. This is my first JavaOne. Since the keynotes were streamed live, and the twitter stream were constantly being updated by so many people, I did not feel the urge to blog about it at the conference. I did a couple of tweets.
This blog entry is mostly for my friends and colleagues who did not go to JavaOne this year and who did not follow the various news and blog feeds. Answers to the "Hey, Weiqi, you are back. How's JavaOne?" I get in the hallway.
Oracle Endorses JavaFX
Any lingering doubts I had about Oracle's attitudes towards JavaFX were resolved on the Tuesday keynote address, in which Larry Ellison, the next leader of the Java community according to Scott McNealy, praised JavaFX by name:
Larry Ellison (7 minutes into Chapter 5): I've been meeting with different groups inside of Sun, and one of the things we are looking forward to is seeing libraries coming out of the OpenOffice group that are JavaFX based. So I think inside of Sun we would like to see accelerated development based on this exciting new platform, Java with FX, which now allows us, thank you very much James, (for) no more Ajax tools. A lot of suffering programmers will pray for you for the rest of their lives, because they don't have to program Ajax anymore.
Going to JavaFX is going to allow us to build fantastic UIs in Java. And we hope, we are going to encourage the OpenOffice group quickly to build their version of a spreadsheet and a word processor using JavaFX.
So we are very committed to see JavaFX exploited throughout Oracle and throughout Sun.
Meeting People
Meeting people is one of the reasons I went to JavaOne this year. And boy did I meet people!
First off, I met the coauthors of the Pro JavaFX Platform, Jim Weaver (aka JavaFXpert), Stephen Chin (aka Steve on Java), and Dean Iverson. The four of us presented the JavaFX course at Java University on Monday. I also attended Stephen and Jim's technical session based on the book. The printed book will come out in a few weeks.
I also got to meet these people: Josh Marinacci, Richard Bair, Jasper Potts, Chris Campbell, Amy Fowler, Brian Beck, Brian Goetz, Jai Suri, Neal Gafter, Joshua Bloch, Tor Norby, Jeff Brown, Guillaume Laforge, Graeme Rocher, Dierk Koenig, Jonathan Giles, Carl Dae, Stuart Marks, Jeff Martin, Peter Pilgrim, Geertjan Wielanga, Andres Almiray, Danno Ferrin, Chet Hasse, Eric Bruno, Jim Clarke, Gail and John Anderson, and more. It's nice to meet people face-to-face. Nicer still when they say: "I read your blog" or "I read your article" or "The name rings a bell. You are the ..." Thank you.
Java 7
The big story on the Java 7 front is
The CLASSPATH is dead.
How so? Through the new work that is being done with modularity in Project Jigsaw.
On the JVM side there is JSR 292 invokedynamic bytecode. The story there is that the JVM is multi-lingual and will be home to all sorts of languages. Scala and Groovy had very strong presence.
I think it's been long enough from the debates that I can say without getting emotional that closure and reified generics won't be in Java 7. Maybe they really do want us to use those other languages on the JVM that have closures.
I'm completely green in this area, but even I picked up some of the cloud computing vibe at Moscone Center. The Sun cloud and Google App Engine for Java were the most prominent. This blog is served by a collection of servlets running on my home machine. I imagine from a cost saving perspective, it would make sense to host it on the Google cloud.
I did go to the Google App Engine BOF and asked the question about obstacles for porting existing web apps to Google App Engine. The short answer is that file system access, data storage, and threading restrictions are the major obstacles. A longer, more philosophical answer is that one should not think of Google App Engine as "another Java hosting service" but rather a highly scalable machine managed by Google that happens to be programmable in Java.
The Toy Show (And The Show Toy)
The James Gosling toy show was fun to watch. Although none of the featured acts strike as super cool, The JavaFX Designer Tool that Tor Norby demoed did inspire awe from the audience.
Aside from its utility (think InterfaceBuilder for the Mac) for designers of JavaFX application when it is released by the end of 2009, I think another message, subliminal though it may be, is that JavaFX can be used for serious applications now.
The Java Store that is also previewed at the show reinforces that message, as do other presentations that demonstrated the use of JavaFX in their applications (I missed the talk by Dierk Koenig about JavaFX + Groovy = Beauty + Productivity, but the Geertjan has blogged about it on JavaLobby).
This year's JavaOne show device is the HTC Touch Diamond phone that is selling for $219 at the JavaOne store. It is a pretty usable device that has JavaFX pre-installed. Come to my cube tomorrow (or go to the St. Louis JUG tomorrow evening) and I'll show it to you.
That's some of my impressions of JavaOne this year. I'll post some JavaFX specific thoughts and pointers in future blog entries. Now that the book is almost done, I can resume my regular blog posting pace.
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