JavaOne Day One

Photos and news from the first day of JavaOne.

So I kicked around JavaOne the first day. A couple of things:

With the exception of the SWING teams new OpenGL rendering layer, which is really amazing, the opening keynote was painfully boring. Somebody really needs to teach these these guys about showmanship. Anyway, the SWING thing is awesome. Basically it is a way to render SWING into JOGL 3D stuff. Aside from opening up some cool options for effects in your standard UI, this gives 3D and Gamers a full, right widget set right inside JOGL. That is an amazingly powerful thing right there, especially seeing all the work that people like SOE put into maintaining their own widget toolsets.

I went to the EJB3 and JAX-WS stuff. Honestly I don’t have much to say about them. There really wasn’t anything that compelling in them most of us haven’t seen a dozen times already.

Project Tango is exciting. This is basically an interoperability on the ws-* effort between Sun and Microsoft. I talked about this briefly during the NetBeans day stuff, but I would like to elaborate a bit more.

the greatest part about the Tango/WSIT stuff is that it recycles the APIs that match already in the other Java specs. EJB transactions demarcations become WS-Transaction. WS-SecureConversation maps to Stateful Session beans. It is some neat stuff.

The last two tech sessions I went too were good, but it seemed the audience was not “getting it”. One was REST with JAX-WS. Frankly, it is just bad. Don’t pay much attention to it. However, when the Q&A started, it became obvious that the crowd just didn’t “get” REST at a kind of fundamental level, so it spiralled off into nowhere fast.

I also saw Hani give the TestNG presentation. He didn’t say “turdburgler” once :(

This session, like the REST session, just kind of lost it at the end. It was kind of obvious that the concepts skipped over the head of a lot of the audience. I don’t think this was Hani’s fault per se. I think the slides could have been a little more clear on t he various layers of spin up and configuration, but it was a good presentation.

I also went to see this:

It was very cool, but plagued by a not-so-level floor and rough carpet, as well as transit damage to the bots.

The highlight of the day was the Java Posse BOF through. Since the promised keg was vetoed by the Argent Hotel, we ended up walking about looking for an open bar (Katie O’Brien’s is a nice place, btw)

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