Perspectives and Observations from the New JavaOne

I have not been to the JavaOne conference since it's heyday back in 2001. Java had it's time in the, ahem, Sun, and now we are all wondering what it will now be like to experience this annual gathering co-located as an Oracle developer confab. My California based manager Sunil Murthy had the great opportunity to participate at JavaOne 2010 / Oracle OpenWorld, experience the new Java conference and meet developers and thought leaders in our industry. I posed the following questions about the conference in September.

Hey Sunil, I trust you are rested up from the grueling conference schedule. I wonder what was the atmosphere like this year with the Oracle led event?

With all the walking between hotel locations of keynotes and Javaone camp, yes absolutely Ryan! I believe folks appreciated the technical content that is signature Javaone and also the surprising level of technical details that Larry and Thomas provided in their respective keynotes. I'll point to a couple of key take-aways that stood out. First and foremost is Oracle's entry into cloud computing aligned with Amazon EC2. Second, the Java roadmap, highlighted by Thomas Kurian's keynote, seeks to reinvigorate Java innovation with an Oracle "stamp." I did, however, gather from my own impression as well as in talking to folks, that the Java development community is "thirsty" for a vendor neutral forum, as was widely discussed in various forums.

What bits would you share from the cloud computing announcements?

After dismissing cloud computing last year, Oracle was all over cloud computing during the conference. The keynotes touched on "what is cloud computing" based on Amazon's EC2 definition, and made it abundantly clear on not aligning with the Salesforce.com view.

Which technical talks were most interesting for Java developers about future directions?

In my view, there were seemed to be a big focus on modularity, new programming models, new languages and of course mobile frontiers - isn't there always? ;) There was good talks about a modular java platform Jigsaw. There is ever increasing interest in the language Scala on the VM, but I can't tell if Scala is the new Ruby or not, if you know what I mean? There was also a talk about hybrid OSGi and JEE programming model of note to our team.

Surely there was talk about the front end?

Oh yes, how could I forget. There was a lot to do about ease of use with JavaFx and the demo was fantastic! Check it out on YouTube. There is Java, JavaScript and HTML5 support, with the claim that HTML5 is strategic. Native client runs on HotSpot and JavaFx is common across browser and native client. Very cool stuff.

What did you learn from discussions with developers in the Java community?

Really there is a lot of concern about the direction of the community but there is also a lot of optimism. Java is a growing developer community that is only becoming more specializing with the platform growing into areas like mobile with Android and gaming. There is concern over the JCP, but the Java developer community is 9 million strong and the marketplace is vibrant with healthy competition. Enterprise Java is a mature platform but it is evolving and changing.

Thanks for sharing your JavaOne 2010 observations with us Sunil.

Until next time,

Ryan Boyles

@WebSphereEmerge