The first full day at JavaOne was fullon, I left the hotel at 7.30am and have just got home now at 10.45pm! First call of the day was the free breakfast and then the first General Session of the conference. The queue was huge, with basically everyone attending queuing to be in the same room all at the same time. It filled up three walls of the massive food hall. We got in really quickly though (the whole conference has been really efficient really, it has to be with 15,000+ people attending). As we got closer I could hear Hey Ya by Outkast playing and when I walked in the door to the literally the largest room I have ever seen there was a bunch of people dancing on the stage. As we crowded for a closer look, we found out that it was actually Outkast (not what sure what they have to with Java but anyway) and they basically rattled off all their hits as the room was filled. I will take some photos of the main hall, words cannot describe how large it is!

The keynote then started with some big wigs from Sun and it was really interesting. They invited guests in Amazon (to show the Kindle), the CEO of Sony Erricsson and then finally Neil Young. Neil was showing off his latest discography collection on Blu Ray that makes use of Java for the interactive menu system, pretty sweet really. It was announced that 100% of all Blu ray players run Java too, so it definitely gives us a foot up in the market. They also threw out some numbers, NetBeans has been growing at 44% for 3 years in a row now, and MySQL now has 65,000 downloads per day (up from 50,000 before the takeover by Sun).

For some really flashy stuff, there was an awesome demo of JavaFX. It allows Java to run on the web, desktop and mobile devices with no change to the source. The demo was called ConnectedLife which was a mashup of Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. The next JavaFX demo showed off how it could use the specific hardware for graphics acceleration and stuff. It was an app running on a mac that played about 100 different HD movie trailers simultaneously, while swirling around in a globe, very cool. Hard to believe that is Java! The big announcements were that Java 6 update 10 was being shipped today and that OpenJDK had made it into the latest releases of Ubuntu, Red Hat and Fedora (to much rapturous applause).

That set up for a really good and full on day, with my first session taking an in-depth look at Java 6 update 10. the new features are:

  • A new Java Plugin to replace the aging WebStart browser plugin. It is now modular, so just downloads what parts of the JRE it needs
  • A new Deployment Toolkit
  • A new modular Java Kernel
  • No more cold starts, jre running in background process
  • Better AA fonts on windows
  • Nimbus Swing look and feel to replace Metal
  • JavaFX updates

Then a quick session on the next Eclipse release (Ganymede) due for June:

  • A new Update Manager (finally)
  • Subversive SVN client
  • RAP and RCP improvements. These allow rich swing based clients built within eclipse to also be deployed on the web with Ajax with some changes to config files… very cool

Then a session aptly named “ JavaScript™ Programming Language: The Language Everybody Loves to Hate”. This was a really good session if you had an indepth knowledge of the intricacies and anomalies within javascript. Most of which went way over the top of my head, especially when he talked about Higher Order Functions (thats 2 or more nested functions….) …. ahhhh wow

After that was a totally packed session called “Defective Java™ Code: Turning WTF Code into a Learning Experience” which was taken by a lecturer and lead developer on FindBugs. I highly suggest you take a look at his slides. He showed some common traps for young developers such as:

  • When writing multi-threaded apps, they use the field that they are synchronising as the lock/mutex which fails miserably
  • Using the same simple class name as a class in another package and not realising
  • DateFormat should be called DateFormatter and is not thread-safe
  • The intricacies of overriding .equals because it can mean different things in different circumstances

The last 2 sessions were how to develop desktop games with the jMonkeyEngine engine. This is very very cool… and so easy to make something with water effects and 3D effects and stuff. Nice and fast too. The other session was to do with the new field-based annotations (such as NotNull and Immutable) to be included in jdk7 as part of JSR308.

After that (yes there is more) I managed to squeeze into a full hands-on-lab session using OpenPortal and GWT to create a simple Ajax application that uses WebServices to display stock price updates. There seems to be a huge focus on Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) so it was nice to get hands on with some of this.

I have another very full day tomorrow but here are today’s photos

I see the iPhone is going to be released in NZ…. hmmmmm lol

Seeya all tomorrow night ;)

Dave