Bill Roth's Blog

JavaOne never ceases to amaze me. Year after year, I expect the show to be a flop. This year is no exception. I am wrong again this year. In my cab ride from my hotel in the Theatre District, I can see hundreds of attendees (obviously developers) trekking their way through the Tenderloin, across Market and Mission to Moscone.  With their wheeled-backpacks in tow, the mirthless programmers, mostly male, trudge toward the 12th JavaOne.

John Gage

As always, the sonorous John Gage started out by introducing the conference, and talking about the 81 hours of JavaOne. Gage started out by quoting some press coverage from John Markoff of the NY Times, and seems to presage a open source announcement around phones. John Cage started waving a phone around talking about what would happen when you open source a phone. He also recalled a speech by Robert Kennedy, Jr. at an environment conference over the weekend. And it would not be a JavaOne without the obligatory reference to the excitable Brazilian programmers.

Gage mentioned last year that JavaOne would trying to me carbon-neutral. He talked about their process in figuring out the price of offsetting the price of energy use. In Europe, the cost of a ton of carbon is about $3.50. Gage's theory after proper accounting, this price is off by an order of magnitude, and promised to have a update for next year. I can't help wondering what this has to do with Java and coding. While I understand the need to juxtapose Java with something cool, like the environment.

Rich Green

After a brief video, Sun software head (and returnee) Rich Green came out. Green, with a voice like The Newshour's Roger Rosenblatt,  started out with a discussion of communities, in front of a banner which says "The Network is an unstoppable Force." He then gave the obligatory numbers slide:

• 6M Java developers
• 5.5B Java devices
• 2.5M Glassfish downloads
• 800M desktops
• 1.8B phones
• 11M televisions

He also mentioned that Oracle announced JEE 5 compatibility, but if you read closely, this is only a tech preview. BEA has been shipping a commercial version since March of this year.

Martin Harriman, VP from Ericsson came on stage. He announced Ericsson will open source their IMS technology to drive IMS adoption. Not clear if its IMS on the client or server. Then Sun announced the Sun Java Multimedia Application Server, which appears to be Glassfish with SIP and IMS. Green then continued to talk about Real Time Java, which sounds a lot like WebLogic Realtime, which BEA announced in September 2005.

The CIO of NASDAQ Anna Ewing, then came on stage. She mentioned that NASDAQ runs its trading systems on Java. She mentioned their peak transaction load is 150,000 transactions per second. She mentioned in February they had a 5 billion share day, all on Java, and that they are working with Sun in the next generation trading system.

Green then moved to the digital entertainment section of his presentation. He mentioned that Java is in all blu-ray devices. He invited Tom Hallman from Sony's Digital Authorization Center on stage to talk about Bluray. The Bluray spec, BDJ, has Java written into the spec. Hallman then showed a demo of the Bluray disk for the movie Open Season. The key thing is that with Java, the graphics can now be random, as opposed to pre-programmed in the current level of technologies.

Green then dove into the portion of his talk where he conflates with Java with Netbeans. This is the annual section of Sun's keynote where they use their monopoly on Java to fool developers into using their IDE which is build as part of their astro-turf community, netbeans.org. (And yes, I have strong options about this because of my involvement of Eclipse, and BEA Workshop.)

He then announced the completion of the open sourcing of OpenJDK, and the introduction of the interim Governing Board. The also announced that Sun will make the Compatibility Kit available to the community. He did NOT way the TCK would be open sourced. He mentioned that it was still under GPLv2, and that Java and NetBeans will be distributed with Ubuntu.

He then mentioned that they would be doing releases in Spring Summer and Fall to make it faster. Faster to download, and faster to run.

He thing annouced JavaFX and JavaFX script for consumers. Visually-rich, and consumer oriented, based on Java SE (and, he also said sotto voce, forthcoming languages), which runs out to be JavaFX script. My first question is: "Do we need another scripting language?" My second question is "Do we need another Flex?" In order to reinforce the importance of the importance, he brought up James Gosling, the father of Java. His point was that JavaFX was all about building rich-dynamic applications. They then bought up Chris Oliver the developer of JavaFX to show a demo of scripted Java2D. This appear to be their run at going after Flex and Microsft Silverlight.

Green then annouced JavaFX Mobile, which appears to be a Flex Mobile competitor, and then showed a phone. The phone he showed looked remarkably like the iPhone. A Yahoo exec came up and talked about Yahoo Go.

Dr. Djibril Diallo  and Curriki

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO, then came up to congratulate Green on the annoucements. He brought up Dr. Djibril Diallo from the United Nations, who is director of the program for Sports for Development and Peace. Dr. Diallo then gave an impassioned speech about feeding the 1.5B people who go to bed hungry, and what he called Gender Apartheid, saying "No country trats its women as well as its men."

Scott McNealy came on stage to talk about Curriki, which is a source of curriculum on a Wiki. Its an educational non-profit.

During the closing, Gosling mentioned BlueJ.org, which has an ide for teaching kids how to program, and mentioned a web site mygames.java.sun.com.