JavaOne 2008 – Don’t be shy – General Session and offical kick off of 75 hours of …

At this moment we are sitting in the Moscone Center South in the general session offically opening JavaOne 2008. The room is very much packed and the T-shirt plus Jeans guys are on stage (James Gosling, John Gage).

The first advice given to the 15k or so attendees is: do not be shy. Ask that question you think may be stupid – because it is not really stupid as almost no question is actually stupid. Meet people, make contact and learn from shared experiences.

All in all, the session is primarily for giving the crowd a warm feeling about Java and the hot technology asscoiated with it. It seems to bring very little actual news. Java is great, we are great, hot stuff is happening.

The first demos are sensor oriented: RFID sensors measuring people entering and leaving the sessions and sending the signals to central monitoring and reporting systems, providing clear insight in the attendance of sessions (and whether people start leaving in the middle of a session, virtually blowing the speaker’s chances of reaching Rockstar Status).

Next, on to Rich Green. Executive Vice President Software Sun. Ian Freed, VP Kindle at Amazon. Kindle is a device, an eBook. It is a fairly flat device, wireless, black & white display it seems, that allows on line acquisition of books that are then downloaded to the Kindle handheld and can immediately be read. Newspapers are easily downloaded and available for reading. See http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA . Having 100.000+ plus readily available is nice, but from where I am sitting it does not look like a hot appliance. Unfortunately, the live demo died…

Rikko Sakaguchi comes next, Senior VP at Sony Ericsson,.showing an impressive video (two years old) and announcing that the device shown in the video will be available sometime this year. Unfortunately, he did not actually show the device…

Then onto Java FX. The first demos were cool, until they too failed. Running an application in the browser that connects to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Then the applet was dragged from the browser unto the desktop, gaining some additonal features in the process. Looking cool, and apparently easy to develop using JavaFX. See: http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp .

Cool demos of rendering High Definition Video and Audio, rendering the video on panels flying in 3D space. ‘it is our future plan’ was the closing comment that makes us wonder when we will have this available.

JavaFX mobile – last year the early version, Since last year Sun talked with all device vendors. A very insightful blog article (http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/04/23/sun_javafx_profiles/ ) states among other things:

In a briefing with press Tuesday, Sun made it clear final code won’t
be released at JavaOne as Sun is still taking feedback from end users
on features.

Sun explained the lack of code saying it’s spent the past year
working with designers to get the various elements of JavaFX right with
the ability to import design elements from existing tools.

Release Schedule

Today Java 6 Update 10 Preview Release

July 2008 Java FX Desktop SDK Early acces program

fall 2008 Java FX Desktop 1.0

Spring 2009 JavaFX Mobile  and TV 1.0