Looking at the clock it is now basically day three of Java One 2007 – it is just after midnight Wednesday with all the Thursday sessions starting up in a few hours. Considering that I should really jump to bed and get a shut eye, but there are just too many things going through my head.
The last two days at Java One were part of my first attendance of this conference and I am confident that they were not the last time. I just made way too many good contacts and got inspired by the vibrant community. Although I knew that I was going to learn a lot I underestimated how much I was actually going to learn.
The range of things I learned vary widely in topics from extremely technical details to tips about running my JUG. I will get into detail here and there in upcoming posts, but for now I am just going to talk about the Tuesday afternoon general session to follow up my previous posts.
The general session from Sun went into detail about some of the earlier announcements from the morning session and showed off some cool stuff. There were some take aways that I am definitely going to follow up on.
First of all it was really impressive to see various scripting lanaguag support in GlassFish. They deployed native Ruby, Java and JavaScript web applications in their native format and GlassFish picked up what is coming its way, selected the necessary dependencies to process the scripts like JRuby or Phobos. This is all really impressive, but until any Java developer can easily buy a cheap hosting package at any ISP that allows him to run all that and not be stuck with PHP on Apache I am not going to be happy. Java on the server for the masses still pretty much requires to at least have your own VM or dedicated box. As far as I am concerned that is not good enough.
As a second highlight I saw the NASA developed geospatial browser WorldWind the first time and was blown away. I knew I should have checked this out earlier. I am defintely going to give it whirl when I get home. You should too. And keep in mind that it is all open source so you can quite easily do your own mashups with it. Very impressive.
The next demo was about an online image gallery administration as well as image manipulation system called Iris. Damn hot stuff and some very clever usage of applets, css and other tricks I don’t know about yet. I can’t wait to find out a bit more how it is all done. Imagine flipping through your photos in the browser window like through the pages of a magazine in your hands in full 3D. Awesome. Now drag and drop and image from your photo camera capturing tool right onto the web page and see how it gets added to the gallery. One more click and the whole things is in full screen mode. WOW.
To top it all off the same sort of features and some more were implemented with JavaFX in a very short time frame. I am looking forward to the lab about it tomorow. The main author of JavaFX Script Chris Oliver better get a raise. Oh and whoever came up with the JavaFX Script name better get a told off big time. Might as well have it called Bauhaus as a nod to the former name of JavaFX script Form Follows Function (F3). Maybe we should have just left it at F3.
Anyway.. thats it for tonight. No more. Time for bed.