This is my third JavaOne. Many topics were discussed, friendships were made, new partnerships were started. I must say things have changed a lot and stayed the same yet again, here are my thoughts in no particular order, bear in mind that they do not represent the opinion of my current employer nor the open source teams I am member of.

 Photo: Arun Gupta

So where do we start? oh yes the main keynote, though we saw some impressive (and crashing demos) I believe the quantity has been decreasing, is JavaFX the only thing worth showcasing the first day? the next general session showed Glassfish v3 in action, mad props to the Glassfish team, they have literally changed my opinion on JEE/App Servers, I mean GV3 is so small you can even embed it in mobile devices (which I believe is one of their targets) and don't get me started about the boot time, is blazingly fast! congratulations for making the software we were expecting years ago, now let's move forward!

Back to JavaFX, I have mixed feelings with it. On one hand it has rekindled the interest on Java Desktop, added some nice missing features to Swing (translucent and non-rectangular windows, mixed-mode applets), pushed the envelop with SceneGraph, JWebPane and other ui related libraries, enhanced media capabilities (video). On the other hand we have seen an exodus of top talent, other development areas being neglected because JavaFX demanded more resources, and unstable language syntax slated to be released in a couple of months.

Ted Neward said it well at the G2One/NFJS meeting, it doesn't matter if Sun gets it right, or wrong, or barely mediocre, we will complain anyway, so we might as well do it in a constructive manner (like Dion did). On JavaFX Script's defense I must say that the ability to bind a value to any expression is a feature I consider to be the most powerful and useful, one I would love to have on Groovy but requires grammar changes to the language itself (so it is not going to happen any time soon, if ever), still having multiple inheritance and function pointers doesn't appear to me to be a good idea for a language designed for content authors in mind. Where are the tools? one year has passed and we are still waiting to see a Photoshop/Director like tool, perhaps it is already in the works or about to ship, but I think the moment to ship it was last week.

Sun is really pushing for the multilingual VM (already endorsed 4 languages other than Java: JRuby, Jython, JS[Rhino], JavaFX Script) and Scala is not that far behind. I've read some people complaining about this event not being 100% Java (the language) anymore, which IMO is a good thing, I for one welcome our polyglot programming overlords. Walking by the hallways you could hear people talking about those upstarts of the JVM, dynamic languages and such.

Which brings me to what happened at the Script Bowl. Groovy and JRuby where the clear "winners" in the sense that their mindshare has a solid foundation, the project leads have a clear set of goals, language interoperation being one of them and no more bickering. I was happy to hear how Charles answered a question more or less like "Is language XYZ going to take over Java" in a very profound way, I'm beginning to think the JRuby vs Groovy debate has finally ended and we are moving on. Which is not what the Scala advocates reflect, as it the language continues to be pushed as the next Java. To put it in the words of a fellow JRoller blogger, Java requires closures because Joe Average can't switch to Language XYZ, so how come a more powerful language as Scala can be the next blue collar language if Joe Average is not able to get inner classes and closures working?? That being said I have no problems with Scala the language, it is the Scala community that is at risk of being the next Rails community, stop that train! the JVM is too broad to waste electric ink in petty and pointless "My language is better than your language" debates.

Nevertheless, thanks Sun for a great event, thank you to all speakers and attendees and volunteers and everybody involved. Many topics were discussed, friendships were made, new partnerships were started, now let's move forward and cash in, let's push the JVM to its limits!

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Photo credit: Photo courtesy of Arun Gupta of Sun Microsystems.

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