JavaOne 2008

JavaOne was interesting this year. It was non-stop from morning until late at night between presentations, meeting people, and parties in the evening. I wish more of the presentations were more technical, but many were to convey new technologies, JSRs, etc. and didn't have time to delve in-depth. Although, spec leads don't always make the best lecturers even though they know the subject well. Two very good speakers were Brian Goetz and Joshua Bloch.

Brian Goetz's presentation of possible new concurrency features in Java 7 was very interesting. A key feature is to allow a large task that can keep being forked to build a work queue and let the VM manage threading and delegating the task to available CPUs. From what he said, this will apparently scale much better than the way things are handled currently on large multi-core systems, which will become more and more prevalent. Built on top of this forking will be ParallelArrays which will allow much better concurrent processing of large arrays by delegating tasks like getting the max value, sums, filtering, etc. to multiple core processors and then processing the results coming back from all the cores.

Joshua Bloch has an update to his Effective Java book adding around 20 more examples. Apparently his example of creating the classic singleton with a private constructor that returns an instance through a method is hackable in some way (he didn't go over the code) and he said the best way to create a singleton is to use an Enum since then the VM will enforce the singleton paradigm for you. Otherwise he covered some interesting tips on more effectively using enums instead of using complicated two dimensional arrays to contain the data. He signed autographs of the new book at the book store a number of times and I believe his book was the top seller at the book store.

Getting to see new technologies was probably the highlight of JavaOne for me. Sentilla has a new wireless sensor device that uses Java ME. They had them setup at the conference to record temperature, CO2 levels, and used an IR sensor to track people coming in and out of conference rooms. I got a dev kit to play with, but I still need to order some sensors for it (comes with a built in accelerometer). The new Java Speech API presentation was really interesting. It looks very easy to use for speech recognition and synthesis. The spec lead from Conversay did a great demo of their implementation for mobile devices. In a completely normal voice he was able to create a reminder. They've apparently worked on this for 3 years and this implementation in just 256K of memory (main engine not in Java). I was also able to attend the JSR-303 Bean Validation presentation. It's nice to finally see that there will be a validation implementation in the Java language for people to leverage. Validation is very often overlooked by developers even thought it's very important, but hopefully this will help make validation much more accesible to the average developer. In the final keynote address with James Gosling, there were a number of interesting things. There was a Java powered car with quite a number of sensors on it. The JMars project uses Java to help correlate all the data we've been receiving from Mars to make it easier to review. It was pretty cool that they showed a satellite image and were able to bring up a rover view of the same spot. Also an arrow pointed between the two images to indicate the rock you saw from orbit was the same one the rover was looking at. Someone from CERN labs was there and apparently almost everything they have is Java powered. Lot's of Swing GUIs and probably one of the cooler things was seeing Java 3D show the result of a collision and all the subatomic particles generated.

It's really amazing what Java is being used for and how much better the performance is compared to 10 years ago. It's also amazing how far Open Source projects have come and their wide acceptance in corporate culture. SpringSource, the developers of the Spring Framework, have become a very large company based their framework. I saw people from SpringSource every night I was out. Oddly there were only 3 Spring presentations at JavaOne (two of new features in Spring 2.5 by Rod Johnson and a Spring Security presentation by Ben Alex). I say oddly because according to SpringSource, Spring has surpassed EJBs as the primary skillset requested on job boards from developers. I felt Sun focused a little too much on it's technologies. It is supposed to be JavaOne, not SunOne. There's nothing wrong with an Open Source project surpassing something in Java EE. In fact I think that this is what gives Java an edge over .NET. Without all the great open source initiatives, it would be a much more level playing field between the two.

I'm glad I was able to attend and hopefully I will be able to attend again next year. I had time to see Tim O'Brien, author of the Jakarta Commons Cookbook (among others), and current Maven Sage. I also met Emmanuel Bernard, the specification lead for JSR-303, briefly after his presentation. I was able to talk to a few people from SpringSource that I met at The Spring Experience too. I highly recommend going to The Spring Experience if you're using Spring or want to. It looks like Java will be more and more places that you might not expect it over the next year. Hopefully it will be another good year for Java and the language and Open Source projects will continue to evolve to fulfill everyone's needs. I'm happy that I still enjoy programming in it and also to be getting back involved in Open Source.