Last year I completely skipped all the general sessions at JavaOne as they seemed like a big yawn. This year I figured I’d hit one or two and see if there was any interesting news related to the Oracle acquisition.
When I walked in they had the house lights going and the big screens and the house music pumping. Java almost looked cool…if it weren’t for all those nerdy dudes with backpacks. :)
First the Sun guy Chris came up with the blah blah blah. He announced two things – first was a thing called DarkChat which is a massive multi-user chat system built with JavaFX and using Sun’s distributed game platform Project DarkStar. He did a little demo and at a glance it looked like something designed by a 5 yr old, but hey it’s hard to tell in a 1 minute demo. There also seems to be some sort of competition involved to collect “golden dukes” (no really, I’m serious). I’m sure it will be all the rage.
Chris also introduced some new iPhone/Blackberry mobile app called Micello. I can’t look at the site of course since I don’t have one of those, so I’m not sure what it is.
Then Jonathan Schwartz came up for a series of business blah blahs. He announced Java SE 7 and Java EE 6 were available, which seemed a little disingenuous to me but hey who’s counting. He also seemed to delight in saying there were a billion desktops with Java today.
After that, eBay was up saying how Java was the bomb. Then RIM were up demoing some new Java apis for integration into Blackberry. Then Don Eklund from Sun was up talking about Blu-ray.
Then a partnership announcement with Verizon from Lowell McAdam. Interesting mention was that there are 6 million Java developers in the world. Lowell says new LTE data will get 10 Mbps to your phone. New developer stuff to be announced in July.
Then Diane Bryant was up from Intel. Fast hardware makes us happy. There was much rejoicing. Chicago Board of Options Exchange guy Paul Ciciora came up to talk about using Sun and Intel stuff. They do 300k TPS – 2.5 billion per day. Not bad. :) As always he did some complaining about garbage collection. He mentioned interesting thing was that as the load gets heavy, the new Xeon will actually overclock and work harder, so he saw GC times actually go down as the test went on.
Then it was time for some JavaFX pumping. Ronan McBrien showed off running JavaFX running on a TV with interactive menus over a movie. Pretty cool stuff.
Nandini Ramai came up to show off some new JavaFX tools as an interactive development tool – targeting TV, phones, etc. She showed off some video and audio editing. Lets you create different versions of your content for TV/phone etc. And deploy to the Java Store of course. Tool is supposed to be available by the end of the year. I might have missed it but I didn’t hear any name for this magical tool.
And of course had to get some James Gosling in the mix at the end talking about the Java Store. The app store was a prototype for last year’s JavaOne but they decided not to show it. The beta version is out today – for use and for developers.
That segued into the CEO of Jagex talking about Runescape, a free game available (of course) on the Java App Store – 175 million accounts, 10 million players per month. James gave them a Duke’s Choice award. (Which by the way, Terracotta also received today.)
Jonathan then talked about what leadership was and I liked the quote that “Innovation is an act of courage”. He used that as an intro to invite Scott McNealy up for a love fest and some t-shirt slinging.
Then there was a Duke’s Choice award for Alice 3 and Carnegie Mellon with a tie-in to Randy Pausch who worked on Alice.
Finally Scott McNealy got up and made some jokes about Oracle / Sun partnership (a picture of Larry’s yacht with Java on it), etc. And then invited up Larry Ellison. Larry actually said he was urging the OpenOffice teams to build stuff with JavaFX. He also talked a bit about Android Java apps for mobile and netbooks.
I’m twittering from JavaOne at @puredanger although between Twitter and wifi load it might be spotty.