JavaOne 2009, day one, part one

Morning keynote

So after a fitful nights sleeps I make it to the keynote which a little time to spare. The keynote room in 90 degree on from last year which give a good feel for the smaller numbers. Normally it would fill this massive underground room at Moscone, today it looks like only about 60% of it. Still the atmosphere is much better today, I guess that I could chalk up yesterday to the jet lag.

On minor niggle is that in previous year you always go an extra gift if you were either a speaker or a Alumni. (I am both) This year only paying Alumni get anything, which is a shame as I need a new jacket for Canoeing. Oh well as they say beggars can't be choosers.

From the stands at the pavilion last night you can guess there will be a lot about the cloud. I am not personally sure how this one will end up but from my experience there is at least a strong need for little fluffy clouds (lfc) within organizations. For example farms to build and test code using Hudson is something I have been involved with recently at work. Of course with the right infrastructure these should be transparently relocatable to big iron clouds on the internet. Just how much companies want to expose there system this way though is open for debate. For example I can't see many companies risking source code on the net just so they could make use of cloud services to build and test.

But I guess onto the keynote presentation, lovely DJ at the start which set the mood at start of the presentation.

The keynote did seem to start with an announcement that JDK 7 had been released, this was later corrected, but it did cause some confusion and lots of frantic web surfing in the crowd. This was correct in the afternoon keynote.

They did a bit on how ebay uses java. Billions of database transaction; but what was interesting is that they didn't explicitly say they used JEE technology. That could just be a typo though.

With a bit of a tease the next section was announced as the world most successful smart phone. I suspect that more than a few people in the crowd thought we were going to get Java on the iPhone; but it was of course RIM talking about blackberries. The demo was kind-of retro at least in the parts of the UI that were from blackberry. Didn't make me want to develop for that platform really no compared with the stuff that comes out from apple.

Moved on to consumer stuff, such as kindle. Demo of BluRay but appears more of a plug for Sony films rather than any specific for Java. Verizon then Intel followed and I was kinda loosing hope.....

Things go more interesting when they showed JavaFX running on a LG HD tv. Interesting that the java VM on the TV had lost of graphics acceleration so you can quite happily run java apps that overlay and embed HD video.

Nandini Ramani, no idea why I thought to note that down, came on stage to present on JavaFX tooling. Using web start which is interesting as sun really seems to bringing this back. Perhaps this relates to the Java Application store which makes a lots of use Some really nice feature to show FX for different displays at the same time. Lots of NeXT like screen guides for laying items out. Some nice visual wiring so you can connect say buttons to video assets. Looks like really nice tooling, works with the apple store. Annoyingly this tool wont be available until the end of the year would have been better if they said that at the start of the presentation.

The next segment focused on the new app store. They have been playing with the idea for some time; but the key is to make it easy for developer to convert there work into money without having to build out loads of infrastructure. I wonder if this will be linked with some kind of cloud offering to support the back end of applications.

Note there are two URL to look at http://store.java.com which is the public face and http://java.sun.com/warehouse which is the developer front end. Interesting in the public beta everything is free. They specifically want feedback on the money model which is kind-of interesting.

One final feature is that because underneath they are using web start you can preview apps without doing a full install. You can just "Preview" it in the app store which basically does a temporary download and install.

To highlight the different programming models they highlighted RuneScape which looked kinda fun. (Apparently in the Guinness book of records and the worlds most downloaded game or something) The game is free to play but they make money by converting users into paying subscribers. (They claim a 20% conversion rate which is pretty good)

Now on to some back patting and a video about the start of java etc. Talk about management is bravery etc, appeared to be focusing on old times. End of an era feel it to.... followed by the standard T-Shirt silliness.

The keynote ended with Larry Ellison coming on stage after some Oracle / Sun merger jokes. Not going to talk about this as we have been specifically asked not to comment on the merger. You can always watch the keynote on the javaone site as I previous noted.

Then up to the gardens above the Moscone center to do presentation prep... which took me to the end of the first morning.