Java Joe

The Duke and the Elephant: PHP Meets Java™ Technology–the Best of Both Worlds
This session turned out to be a commercial for an IBM Product called WebSphere Smash. It has a PHP interpreter on a Java Application server. They came up with some neat ways to have PHP call Java and vis versa. There were a couple of good points about the grass routes growth of PHP and how eventually we are going to see more and more PHP in corporate IT.

What was interesting is that they wrote an interpreter in Java for PHP and not compile PHP straight to Bytecode. They do have a protype to go directly to Byte Code, but it is not in the product. As it turns out, there is no PHP specification for them to follow, and no complete set of tests to confirm that your PHP code is behaving properly.

More “Effective Java”
I am a huge fan of Jashua Bloch. His book, “Effective Java” is by far my favorite technology book. Joshua has come out with the 2nd edition of this book. He presented a few of the items from that book.
He spent a lot of time speaking about Enumeration and the ways to use them. Very powerful stuff. In the first edition of his book he presented an Enum pattern. Well that Pattern is now gone as Java 1.5 now has a built in Enum construct.
I’m going to pick up the 2nd edition of Joshua’s book. He did do a book signing but I had to get to another place.

Spring Framework 2.5: New and Notable
This was just an update as to the new features of Spring 2.5. A lot of support for annotations and meta annotations (annotations on annotations.) By the end of the talk my head was spinning with the annotations. The speaker put up a lot of code examples and jumped from slide to slide. It was very hard to follow.
Support for OSGI was also added to Spring 2.5. OSGI is a mechanism for managing and loading dependencies at run time. This is important when you are using open source components that depend on other open source components and you might have conflicts with the versions that you can use.
OSGI is going to be huge in Enterprise Java. All of the major application servers are going to re-architect their application servers to use OSGI. Knowledge of OSGI is going to become a requirement for Server side Java development and administration.

GlassFish™ Project v3 as an Extensible Server Platform
I know nothing about Glassfish coming into this talk. Seems there was a talk earlier that the speaker is referring too. I would like to get further into Glassfish as it might provide a nice alternative to WebLogic and more functionality than just using Tomcat. OSGI was also a big part of Glassfish.

I bugged out early from the GlassFish talk. I’m going to start my walk through the Vendor Pavilion.

I have one more session to go to from 6 – 7 pm. Virtualizing the JVM. It should be interesting and applicable to one of my current clients.

So one of the last segments of the Key Note address, Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) came onto the stage. After a bit of bander he introduce Neil Young to the stage. When I heard they were calling up Neil Young, I really had my doubts about what it was going to be about.

Neil Young is involved in a project to get his Entire Anthology onto Blue Ray disks. The Blue Ray disks play the music while you are navigating his archives of photos, and papers and videos of the media (CD, 45, 8 Track, etc) that his music was originally published on. He claimed that this is something he has wanted to do for a long time, but until Blue Ray and Java navigation on Blue Ray, it was not possible.

I must say the segment was probably the coolest segment I have seen from a Key Note Address.

Another thing that Neil Young has going on is an entry into the Automobile X-Prize. It has sensors (based on Java) that measure the energy in and out of the vehicle.

The Key Note address was is being led by Rich Green EVP of Software at Sun.

He started out by introducing a term or at least a new term for me, RIA (Rich Internet Application). He really didn’t define it well. It seems to be a combination of Agile Development, SOA, and browser base applications that can be run on any device. Seems to be a bit like mash ups.

They showed a demo of a Browser based Java Application running the new Java Plugin that connected Web 2.0 sites like face book, twitter, flicker in one view. The demo broke. I think the pipe here in the Moscone Center was an issue.

The demo also used Java FX. Java FX has 3D Graphics, codex High Def video, sound, a scripting language, etc. The crux of the Key Note really seems to be using Java FX to build these RIA.

With everything that he keeps saying about these really cool Java Application on mobile devices and how Java is not available on the(my) IPhone.

JavaFX is not out yet. Early release will be available in July. Perhaps the Java IPhone

So I just heard that there are 15,000 people at JavaOne. The line to get into the General session went around not just 1 block but 2 blocks. Of course once you got down the escalator the traffic lessened quite a bit.

We are being tracked. In the conference badges is a RFID chip. They are going to use these chips to make sure that you are registered for a session. They also have biometric sensors around the Moscone center to track the movement of people in and out of sessions and around the convention. JavaOne meets 1984.

The first Key Note speaker has a big spot light on JavaME, and the types of devices that can JavaME can power. Things from mining sensors to pace makers.

So the flight from Philly took off on time, landed on time and it didn’t take forever to get my luggage. I have an exit row seat and life was good. All in all the experience was B+.

I’m looking at the Key Note speakers for this morning. I am not sure if it will be interesting or marketing speak from Sun.

I’ll try to post after the Key note with any in sites.

Joe

Of all the places… The bar at the Air Rock, Flight Rock whatever. End of the Bar. So looks like I get enjoy lunch and get some work done.

I made it to the Philadelphia International Airport. As usual I’m 2 1/2 hours early. I’m not scheduled to be on the ground in San Fran for another 8 hours or so. (Yuk) I’ve got some Billable work to do while I am waiting. I’ve also got a few movies on my trusty IPhone, American Gangster and Elizabeth the Golden Years. Hopefully Bea Arthur doesn’t make an appearance in the 2nd movie. And if I run out of battery power, I have a Book titled, “The Definitive Guide to SOA:BEA AquaLogic Service Bus”

Interesting thing here waiting at the gates. None of the electrical outlets seem to be working. I guess they have a way of turning them off. Don’t want to make it too easy for travelers to get power for their cell phones, or laptops. They will probably come up with a way to charge your for electricity in the airports soon.

I tried to get my JavaOne schedule HTML to show in this blog, but I had issues. So I posted it on my Web Site.

Here is the link: http://www.joekampf.com/JavaOneSched.html