The big presentation

So today was the big presentation... month's of rehearsing, preparation, and skull sweat, all leading up to an hour of terror.

I was in the second to last time slot on Friday, and most of the people had already left JavaOne. On top of that, there were several other good presentations going on at the same time (I would have gone to those, too!).

The turnout was pretty good - 120 folks signed up, about 80 actually showed. They videotaped it (that'll be a horrible experience - I get to watch it and see where I screwed up), and I was miked, which wasn't nearly as bad as I thought - no echoes or delays.

The crowd was pretty good - some intelligent questions, no Maven fanatics. All my rehearsals really helped - I think I was much more measured in my pace than in dry runs (due to my run time, I was right on schedule for this, where previously I ran faster).

The interesting thing is that several other folks told me they'd done similar things with their build scripts, so this seems to be a viable pattern.

Afterwards, a dring, and a long soak in the hotel's hot tub, followed by another dinner at Pazzia. Mmm, Pazzia!

I'm famous!

During James Gosling's keynote (the Toy Show), he showed a screen when people's shots with "digital duke" (they took our photos on a green screen, then you could put custom backgrounds on it). I played around with mine with the little tool they had, and ended up putting myself and Scott McNealy standing on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Imagine my surprise when I saw my picture up there on the big screen!

Dinner at Umbria

I went to Umbria Wednesday night... another great Italian restaurant on 2nd and Howard. Mushrom stuffed ravioli and some wine I should have got the name of...

Dinner at Pazzia

Last night, I took my PJUG friend Jon Bachelor to Pazzia, just a few blocks south of Moscone Center. I've been coming to Pazzia for dinner whenever I'm in San Francisco, and it's always good.

It's one of those small (quite small - to get to the bathroom, you have to go through the kitchen) but lively restaurants. Good food, reasonably priced (full dinner, salad, wine, dessert, coffe - $54).

Jon seemed to like it, so I think I've made a convert. Now I just have to figure out if I'm going to it it up again this trip, or try something new..

Macs at JavaOne

There are more Macs at JavaOne than I've ever seen before... in the speaker ready room, something like 70-80% of the laptops were Mac Book Pros.

If anyone doubts that Macs aren't good developer machines, just have them come to JavaOne and take a look around, that will erase all doubts.

TS-5575 Extreme GUI Makeover - Hybrid Swing and JavaFX Technology

• Why go hybrid? Lots of Swing stuff out there, JavaFX not really designed for heavyweight, enterprise applications
• JavaFX good for UI, not good for logic
• First step - get a GOOD graphic designer!
• Create a JavaFX Stage
• put Swing components in - any Swing components can be embedded - can be treated like any node. Limitation, it's treaded as a single node
  
• Wire components
• FX provides wrappers for many Swing classes
  
• Limitations - JavaFX is single threaded
  

The Java App Store

This is going to be cool - an app store for Java stuff.

Sun's providing the framework (think iPhone store) for developers to share or sell their apps. One nice thing it does is lets you "preview" an app - try out the app and see if you like it before you buy it.

The store is in "closed" beta - by invite only at this point.

Some restrictions on content - provide your own cert for signing, a single jar, etc.

TS-5225 Spring Framework 3.0 (Fun with Rod)

Rod's always interesting, if egotistical and opinionated. He's a smart guy, and will remind you of that. I had the pleasure of dining with him a few years back, and some of the things he said as absolutes were debatable.

Highlights:

• Spring 3.0 is JDK 5+ only
• Eliminate XML config files as much as possible - annotations, expression language
• Extensive generification
• EL - inject stuff from system properties (this is a good thing??)
• REST support!!!
• Easy annotations to get stuff off the request - for example,
  public Reward show(@RequestHeader("region") long regionId, @CookieValue("lanuage" String langId)
• Spring and Flex (SpringFlex)
• Configuration injection looks pretty cool (type-safe, compile-time errors, allows inheritance of configurations)
• Spring Roo - Round-trip code generator, allows modification outside of Roo (think of Grails)

TS-4060 Small Language Changes in JDK Release 7

Project Coin was created to deal with the many requests for small changes in Java

• I love it - the "Elvis" operator - Integer i = getValue() ?: getNonNullValue();
• This will use the first arg, unless the result is null - then it uses the second.
• Simplified varargs
• Using strings in switch statements
  

I'd hoped the talk would delve more into these changes, but most of it was dedicated to detailing how to make changes to the language and the problems associated with it... Oh, well...

JavaOne attendance

For all the talk of JavaOne attendance possibly being down this year, the opening keynote was packed - I mean, every seat was full, more so than last year. LOTS of folks in that hall, I want to find out what the numbers really are this year. I've seen some posts saying it's as high as 15,000 - form what I've seen, that's about right, maybe even a little low..

Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison showed up, and as the paperwork still isn't dry, couldn't go into a lot of details, but did reaffirm his commitment to Java (big surprise).

The great T-shirt toss!

I finally caught one! Actually, two came my way, and still yet another almost knocked my camera out of my hand.

Signs, portents, etc - my presentation on Friday should be good!

Tuesday, General Session

Java 7 is out, new version of JavaFX is out, the Java App Store is out.

The last one is actually pretty cool – yeah, app stores have been done before, but Sun had the idea of letting you actually try the full application before buying it. Minor detail, the payment mechanism isn’t done yet ☺

JavaOne, Monday

I rode the train up from Los Altos, switching to BART at Millbrae. The Powell St. station is right across the street from the Marriott, worked out very nice.

The Marriott is a very nice hotel – great show rates, and I got a room with a view on the 31st floor.

After checking in, I registered at JavaOne, got the obligatory backpack, but no alumni jacket. Apparently, alumni speakers don’t get one (sniff…)

The pavilion was open Monday, so after I did all the speaker registration and stuff, I cruised the pavilion floor. It’s hard to tell because Monday isn’t a large attendence day, but there was a pretty good crowd on the floor. There were fewer small vendors with booths, but a good number of people. Plenty of T-shirts to score, though.

One point of surrealism, in the evening a gay pride marching band performed in the pavilion. I have no idea what this has to do with JavaOne other than it is San Francisco…

Had dinner at the Marriott’s Steak Bar restaurant, very, very good. A bit pricey, but very good.

T-shirt count: 8