My Time at JavaOne

I had the opportunity to attend the JavaOne conference last week. One reason I really enjoy this conference is using it as a opportunity to measure the pulse of the Java industry. For example, last year Ajax was all the rage. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting something Ajax related. So, a common question I would ask, and is often asked of me, "What was the theme this year at JavaOne?" Or, "What is the 'Ajax' of JavaOne 2007?".

Let me give you some more examples. In previous years (in no particular order) the Ajax of the year, was: EJB, EJB 3, JavaServer Faces, ESB/SOA. I am happy to say, in comparison to previous years, there was no ONE technology that dominated the pulse of the conference as much. There were several. Let me briefly share what I thought some of the trends of the industry were, as shown by this JavaOne conference.

• Ajax - While this was a MAJOR theme last year, it was still at LEAST as popular as any other one technology. However, what was astounding in the difference between a year ago and this time, was how common place it was. Andrew Wills, a colleague who attend the conference with me, gave the example of "Instead of talking about how to implement Ajax, the session might be discussing the security considerations about Ajax..." He's right on the money. The conference this year was not trying to prove how good Ajax was, or why you should use it. The trend this year was all about things you have to do, because you already ARE using it.

• OpenJDK - The first of two themes that Sun was primarily responsible for setting. OpenJDK is the name Sun gave to the project which resulted form Open Sourcing the Sun Java Development Kit. There are a few things to mention about this project.

  1. Sun tried to use the message "open sourcing the JDK is complete", but if you attended any session about it, you found out it's not complete. There are a few areas of the project that Sun legally can not open source. 3 areas because they do not have own the Intellectual Property (and the current owner has said they will not allow it to be open sourced) and one area because of United States laws prohibit it (cryptology).

  2. You can not build completely from sources the Open JDK, you must download a binary part.

  3. You can get a snapshot distribution (or build yourself with the binary component), a version of the JDK which is effectively an alpha level of what might become Java SE 7.

  4. Sun named an interim governing board for the project, to create the project constitution. This interim governing board has 5 members, and only 2 are Sun employees.

• JavaFX - Actually this is the second of two Sun themes, but really is the theme that was not a theme. Sun tried to announce JavaFX at the first general session, but there was nearly no meat to what they were announcing. The best that I or anyone else I talk to can tell, is it's a brand. Sun announce a new brand. Um, ok, so why do I care? It reminds me of a few years ago when they made a big "announcement" of the new Java logo. Yippee. I can't compile the logo. I don't know maybe someone else that was there, cares. If, so, please contact me, I'd be interested to talk to you.

• Scripting - Similar to the Ajax mainstream theme I described above. Scripting was just mainstream. One thing I use as a measure for the conference themes, is how popular different books are in the on location bookstore. Three of the top 15 books were scripting related, 2 on Groovy and 1 Ruby on Rails book. The next most popular topic was 2 books on Ajax. Also the best demo of the conference for me, was the demonstration of running a canned out of the box, Ruby on Rails project, in the Java Application Server Glassfish, then modifying the Ruby code in the project, to call out to Java code, and hitting the refresh button in the browser and seeing it work with no redeploy, recompile, or server restart. The possible idea that you can embrace the Ruby on Rails community and share the same application space with them, could be a lot better then a Java EE vs Ruby on Rails debate.

• Miscellaneous JSRs - It's been the case in past years and was the same this year, many sessions focus on describing the current state of a JSR that is in progress. This year's conference fell almost halfway between the release of Java SE 6 and the future release of Java SE 7. So, there was a lot of sessions about JSRs that are in development for that upcoming release. There were also some talks about JSR for a future Java EE release (although either not as many, or I didn't notice them as much as I did the Java SE ones).

Not everyone likes the JavaOne conference. But whether you like the conference or not, it's hard to deny the representation of the Java industry as a whole that the conference depicts. If you know how to analyze the conference, you can walk away with a lot of valuable information that you can apply to your current business.

---- Cris J H