JavaOne has been good so far, below are some of my random thoughts/observations of some of the sessions that I’ve been to so far.
Technical Keynote
The keynote started off a little boring, to me at least, with a lot of dry nerd humor and talk about how Intel and Oracle have worked together to make improvements to both the JVM and hardware to get the best from each other. Thankfully Mark Reinhold came up next and woke everyone up when he started talking about Java SE 7-9. (If you haven’t heard Java 7 came up back in July). Java 7 is a great step forward with features like AutoClosable, String literals in switch statements, multi-catch, and multi-catch, and try-with-resources. Java 8 looks like it will be a “revolutionary” change with Projects Lambda and Jigsaw (more to come on those). The JavaFX was very impressive, as most demos should be, and caught everyone’s attention when they had Duke mirroring the actions of the demonstrator ala Xbox kinect style. I was also happy to hear them say that the Mac OSX version will be GA soon on the same date as the official Mac Java SE7 is available. There are a few projects that we have at work which have been needing some TLC and JavaFX might be getting some action soon.
Choosing a Web Framework
I was actually pleasantly surprised at this session. The presenter did a good job of explaining what all you need to look for when choosing a framework and the repercussions of making the wrong choice. Most of the requirements should be fairly obvious however the speaker stressed the importance, rightfully so, of longterm planning when choosing your framework. What really surprised me was the frameworks he compared/scored; Grails (shocker), GWT (another shocker), Tapestry, and Wicket. Wicket?! We’re migrating to Wicket at work and while I like the framework it just has never seemed to gather that much community support.
Project Lambda
The Project Lambda presentation given by Alex Buckley was very good. Being one of those geeks who enjoys the “thought process” discussions I was really into this one. How some decisions were/are being made and how it will impact future coding and performance. Lots of good stuff but to quote a college of mine “I’m not sure I want Perl in my Java”. The syntax will take some getting used to….
Project Jigsaw
The concepts and implementation details behind Jigsaw are interesting. Generally speaking, it’s taking the best parts of Ruby’s gems, maven, and others and wrapping it all up into the new JDK. The project is also aiming at modularizing Java which is a good thing since it will help keep the bloat down. The presenters were wise to avoid even mentioning OSGI since there will be some contention between the two somewhere down the line. There are a lot of questions that came out of the presentation (like if you get rid of -classpath and everyone is using the module-info.java file how do you handle facades/runtime resources like SLF4j?) and this will be one to watch.


