James Gosling’s general session was rather interesting. He went through a few of the new innovations that Sun and other companies have been doing with Java.
First two are very useful and I can see using them right away. First they showed off a Visual VM tool. This tool pulls together all of the metrics about a JVM into one place. This includes Heap Analysis, and Garbage Collection. It also has an API that allows you to write your own modules.
The next innovation was put on by Tor Norbye of the Java Posse. It was the Javascript integration with NetBeans. It had code complete, and an interactive debugging in Firefox. I think it might be time to give NetBeans a real look.
There was project Darkstar which is like an application server for online games. Seems to have some really neat stuff and allow game developers to concentrate on developing games and not the plumbing that is nessisary to run an online game.
Sentilla is a company that makes JavaME sensors. I wrote earlier in the week about how they have these sensors all over the convention hall tracking the movement of people. THey did an interesgting demo by putting these sensors into beach balls, and having the crowd hit the beach balls around. They displayed the location of the beach ball on the screen. They used some of these Sentilla sensors that used signal strength to calculate the position.
Probably the most interesting piece of JavaME was the Pulse Live Scribe smart pen. This is a pen that can record audio while you write and then replay it, store it on the computer, etc. The pen also allows the development of applications that can run right in the pen. They demoed a very cool piano application. The user of the pen, drew the keys on paper, and then was able to play notes on the piano he drew. God I wish I had one of these while I was in college.
There were also a couple of other demos having to do with Real Time Java. Some industrial applications, an entry for the DARPA XPrize (Tommy Jr. the car was called.), and an application that helped render data from Mars to help them track down water on Mars.