Blogging Roller

Here are some of my (raw and unedited) notes from Rich Green's opening keynote this morning:

• Community, openness, community! humans require communication
• Over the last year, we open sourced Java, grew Glassfish and Netbeans communities
  
• Martin Harriman of Ericssen on stage to announce
• Sun Java System Communications Application Server
• And open sourcing of Ericssen IMS technologies
• Anna Ewing CIO of NASDAQ on stage to say
• Trading tech has been running Java for some time now
• Now prototyping new systems using Real Time Java
• Tom Hallman of Sony on stage to tout
  
• New levels of DVD interactivity and thanks to Blueray
• Netbeans use is up 92% year over year
• Annoucement: Open souring of Java is now complete
• Annoucement: OpenJDK interim governing board
• Doug Lea, Simon Phipps, Mark Rhinehold, Dalibor Topic, Fabiane Nardone
• Will decide constitution and governance processes of OpenJDK community
• Annoucement: improvements to availability of TCK
• Why did Sun choose GPL V2?
• Compatibility matters and GPL forces innovation into open
• Compatible with Linux distributions
• Annoucement: Series of three new faster Java SE 6 releases this year
• Annoucement: Java FX scripting language for rich UX and interactivity
• Rich Green: "Profound change to Java"
• James Gosling: other scripting languages focus on HTML generation not rich UI
• Drives Swing and Java 2D graphics
• Complete line of authoring tools on the way
• Annoucement: JavaFX mobile, complete "desktop scale" environment for phones
• Shows demo models that look pretty iPhoney
  

And a little commentary:

I was a little surprised by JavaFX. I read about F3 a couple of months ago and was pretty impressed. Now we've renamed F3 to JavaFX, we're making it work well everywhere that Java runs incuding the browser and mobile phones and we're developing a line of non-developer friendly authoring tools for it. In short, we're positioning it to compete directly against Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and to some extent JavaScript/Ajax.

I don't know enough about Flex or Silverlight to know how JavaFX stacks up, but it does worry me a bit that JavaFX in the browser relies on Java Applet technology, which may have been greatly improved, but still doesn't have a great reputation. Maybe that's changed: Alex and Linus' favorite game, Runescape, is based on applet technology and it works flawlessly on all of our various computers and operating systems. We didn't notice it was Java until Leo pointed out the  tiny Duke icon in the browser tray.

Update: Apparently, one big problem with Applets will be fixed in Java SE 6 Update 2:

InfoQ.com: "Brewin fleshed out remarks made during the keynote to the effect that Java 6 Update 2 will introduce a new deployment model for the JRE where the initial download is very small and additional JRE components are lazily downloaded only as needed. He said that the concept is very similar to the Java Kernel project proposed for Java 7."

JavaFX is new news, so there are not many blogs or new articles about it. Here are some links I've found useful:

• JavaFX page on Sun.com 
• ZDNet.com: JavaFX headlines JavaOne
• Ed Burnette: JavaFX takes center stage at JavaOne
• http://blogs.sun.com/main/tags/javafx - posts tagged with 'javafx' at blogs.sun.com
• http://technorati.com/tag/javafx - posts tagged 'javafx' via Technorati.com
• Chris Oliver's weblog: the creator of JavaFX (originally known as F3)
• The F3 Programming Language
• Ajaxian - F3: Sun’s new declarative Java scripting language
• Lambda the Ultimate - F3: New statically typed scripting language for java

The announcement of OpenJDK interim board is a good thing is definitely a good thing. It will be interesting to see how the governance shapes up and how quickly the project can become truly an open source project, i.e. with external contributors on equal footing with Sun developers. Like Geir, I did not understand the Java JCK annoucement and haven't yet been able to find a clarification.