Speaker collapses onstage at JavaOne!

No shit, I was attending a session called "Service-Oriented
Architecture and Java", and about five minutes before Q&A, one of the
speakers collapsed onstage!

The other speaker said he'd collapsed, and we all thought they were
joking.

Then he didn't get up.

Then they kicked us out.

We don't know if this was the Norovirus or if he'd partied too hard
the night before, but it's pretty scary, nonetheless.

Heath warnings at JavaOne???

OK, so getting an email from the JavaOne folks warning that the San Francisco Department of Public Health has determined that there's a Norovirus outbreak, and that infected persons have attended JavaOne. So, I've potentially been exposed to a highly contaigious disease. Joy.

On the lighter side, I've been playing with the GWT last night after the AfterDark party. Very cool - within five minutes, I was creating interactive web pages with sophisticated JavaScript - and I don't know JavaScript. GWT lets you use HTML and CSS for page fomat and appearance, but behavior is all in Java. Think about it - design/code in Java, test in Java, unit test in Java, debug in Java, then compile and deploy. Need to debug the deployed JavaScript? Again, you do that in Java by attaching your favorite IDE's debugger.

This mostly eliminates the need for the average developer to be a JavaScript wizard. Let the guys who make widgets do that - I just want to do stuff easily and fast.

Coolest show gadget - the Pulse SmartPen. Turn it on, write stuff down - tap your notes, hear the audo at the time it was written. Stores drawings, text, translates (!!!) across languages, way too much cool stuff. Of course I bought one!

The big theme of JavaOne this year was definately JavaFX - it really looks like it's matured from the rushed demos they showed last year. I took a lab, and some very cool stuff can be done very simply. Still has a way to go, but very nice. The plethora of Web 2.0 technologies seems to offer a lot of ways to accelerate development. Of course, we're still stuck with Struts 1 at work, I'm hoping to change that... :)

Web Beans

Gavin King gave his talk on Web Beans, a proposed framework for merging web and container behavior. Some interesting stuff - imagine having a user object injected into your classes - you don't have to worry about asking a mediator to talk to a manger to get the user, you just call getUser().

Someone asked Gavin about JMS - he really, really doesn't like JMS, in no uncertain terms.

JavaFX Script

JavaFX Script is BIG this year - and with the release of Java 6 update 10, is gonna explode. You're going to see some fantastic UIs created with Java you didn't think possible.

JavaFX is the whole architecture. Part of this is rewriting the browser plugins from scratch, allowing some very cool features - if you like an applet, you'll be able to drag it off of the web page onto your desktop, shut the browser down, and keep running the applet.

How about the ability of applets REALLY being able to talk to JavaScript and vice-versa? Applets will be able to manipulate the DOM. And JavaScript will be able to call any public method of any class - think how much that could change things!

Of course, all this is moot if you're not ready to adapt Java 6 on the client...

JavaOne, baby!

Finally, a session where I can get wireless!

To back up, it's Wednesday here in San Francisco, and I've been here the last two days getting my brain stuffed with more information than it can handle, then staggering back to my hotel and collapsing into bed to repeat the whole thing the next day.

Monday was Java University - the best session was on JMaki and GWT - you can use GWT to do almost all of your application, I'm definatly gonna play with that. Even though it's all AJAX and JavaScript - you don't write any AJAX or JavaScript. You do all your stuff in Java, test in Java (hey, get this unit test your web application in Java!), debug in Java, then compile and deploy to the web. Got problems with the web application and need to debug that mess of JavaScript and AJAX that was created? No problem - attatch your Java debugger to the server and step through your Java code while the JavaScript and stuff is executed on the problem page.

How cool is that? How much time could we save doing development in that environment - and think of how much cooler the UI could be?