Under My Palapa

The concept that JavaFx cannot be embedded into an existing Swing application baffles the mind. There were hacks to do this in 1.1, and I have it working in 1.2 (minus mouse events), but to not support this in the official API is one of the strangest things I’ve seen. This would be the #1 way to drive adoption of JavaFx, yet Sun seems to be blind to this fact. There are plenty of Swing apps that could be enhanced to have some nice eye-candy charts, etc.

JavaOne 2009 is over, and it was my second year in a row to attend. Looking back, I would have chosen WWDC over JavaOne this year, as I feel I did not get as much out of the conference as I did last year. That is not to say there weren’t some very good sessions…

Highlights from my perspective:

• Project Jigsaw (Java 7 modules) – the modularization of the JVM and application libraries has a lot of promise, and can help cut down on bloat. The keynote demo of this went well. The question of how this lives alongside OSGi is still open for me (although I have not researched this).
• JavaFx 1.2 – the new platform seems to be maturing; the demo apps are getting better.
• JavaFx Designer App – very nice to see Sun realizes this is an important aspect of JavaFx development. Without it, JavaFx will not have a chance long-term. It looked to me like they “borrowed” a lot from Apple’s Interface Builder, which is probably a good thing.
• Java App Store – also nice to see Sun going a step further than Web Start and trying to improve the consumer deployment experience. In the end though, I think the App Store doesn’t have much of a chance. It will depend on the apps, but Sun will have to figure out a way to get people to install the App Store to begin with (JRE bundled?).
• Ben Galbraith – his talks are always a highlight as he is probably the best speaker at JavaOne. His talk about software craftsmanship hit home, because I really want to work on projects where that is viewed as a priority. Making this happen in an enterprise environment is a tough order though.
• Google – between the talk on Google App Engine, Guice, GWT, and the upcoming SiteBricks, it’s clear that Google is making a big investment in Java. I would have really liked to have seen Google acquire Sun, and maybe that would have made sense if Sun didn’t do hardware.

Lowlights

• JavaFx 1.2 – it really broke with backwards compatibility. This is perhaps a good thing if it improves the platform, but it seemed to generate a lot of complaints. You really don’t want to upset developers of a new platform so much. Maybe this happened because JavaFx was released as 1.0 way too early, or maybe this year’s release should have been called 2.0.
• General sessions – they seemed far more filled with what I would call advertising. I understand Intel was the main sponsor, but spending 20 minutes telling us how their new Xeons help improve performance is something that should be pretty obvious to most people. Are they going to come back every year and tell us that Moore’s Law still applies?
• Larry Ellison – his proclamation that Ajax is no longer needed – hah! O RLY?
• The food/beverage service – $3.50 for a 16oz soda? Really? And one beverage cart that I know of serving throughout the day? I think I dehydrated myself. Next time I’m going to be armed with several bottles of water of my own.
• Course descriptions – the content catalog should ideally give a better idea of the target knowledge level that attendees should have. It sucks to go to a session where you learn nothing new because it is just an introductory level talk.