May 18th, 2006
JavaOne Day 3: GWT, Blu-ray, PHP, JUnit 4, and more!
It’s mid-way through JavaOne and this was probably the most interesting day yet! My "stack of stuff" pile is overflowing with notes from the conference, but here are the most important highlights from the sessions I attended or heard about:
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) debuts. Google redefines Ajax programming by coming up with a way to not do it. I have a separate story on that here.
Java beats at the heart of Blu-ray. Blu-ray developers showed off the Blu-ray Disc Java environment (BD-J) today on a Phillips development system. Now your next-gen dvd player, your cable boxes, and your TVs can all run the same type of interactive content (Java programs called "Xlets").
PHP runs on WebLogic. BEA demonstrated PHP code running inside their commercial WebLogic application server. Part of their "Blended" strategy which merges the best of open source and commercial software, this lets PHP deployments take advantage of WebLogic features like clustering and high availability.
JRuby on Rails. The JVM (Java Virtual Machine) can run more than just Java programs. A port of Ruby to this platform has passed an important milestone by running a Rails application. I have a separate story on that here.
JUnit 4: Test re-infected. Kent Beck presented his vision for development testing and explained why JUnit came out of retirement with a shiny new release. The new version has a simpler design and makes heavy use of Annotations.
Extending Java with XML. Mark Reinhold dumped his brain on attendees to get their feedback on ideas to put XML syntax directly into a future version of Java. Reaction was very positive but we’ll probably be arguing for years over the syntax.
Swing on… a phone? Up to now if you wanted to do anything beyond extremely simple user interfaces on a phone you either had to resort to vendor extensions (for example on the Blackberry) or painting all the pixels yourself. With their support of a much larger subset of Java, devices like the SavaJe Jasper S20 threaten to bring mobile Java developers out of the dark ages.
Oracle gives away more stuff. But of course they will make it up on volume. They’ve contributed the reference implementation of EJB3 to the GlassFish project, and a declarative design time environment for EJB3 and JPA to the Eclipse Dali project. They also plan to contribute a bunch of dynamic JSF components to open source.
The Thirsty Eclipse. Those Eclipse guys really know how to throw a party! They rented the second floor of "The Thirsty Bear" and provided free food, beer, pool, darts, and conversation. Erich Gamma, Scott Delap, Rick Ross, Ward Cunningham, and many others were spotted in the crowd. Of course, I took a lot of pictures which I will post later.
Whew! Well, who needs to sleep anyway. If you’d like to know more details about any of these topics let me know.
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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