Saddest thing I've seen this week

Lots of homeless in SF - too many... I saw one guy going through a cigarette disposal bin looking for butts, with the look of absolutely grim determination. You did NOT want to get between this guy and his nicotine fix.

The cops seem pretty diligent in making sure the homeless folk aren't breaking too many rules, but there are so many of them... I can't imagine what its like sleeping on the street. I'm at a conference where they have a ton of extra food - where does it all go? I hope not into a landfill.

A lot of these guys are obviously mentally ill - unemployable. Even if we had jobs for the sane ones, what do you do with the nut jobs?

All hail Vaadin...

After years of being creeped out by seeing the piles of Vaadin books a the JavaOne pavilion, I finally attended a presentation.

It's actually pretty cool.

Vaadin is a server-side framework for web-based UI applications. It basically wraps GWT, and lets you do a lot of cool stuff on the server side and very quickly generate the client UI. The presenter was using JRebel to redeploy his classes - basically, hit the refresh button the browser and the new version of the UI was available. That's another product I need to look at.

Plus, Vaadin has a ton of plugins and a pretty active user community. They make it easy to package custom components, and encourage users to upload them to their plugin repository.

One of the available plugins is an iPad/iPhone LAF.

Check it out - Apache licensed, free, open source: http://vaadin.com

Life is good... Java 7/JavaFX

Got the JDK 7 developer preview for OS X, got the JavaFX preview for OS X, looks like I'll get on the EAP list for JavaFX Scene Builder - This is going to be a GREAT tool for building UIs in JavaFX.

I saw the demo, and it was awesome - I hate editing XML files by hand, and Scene Builder does a great job of laying out your UI and creating the FXML for you.

FXML is the first UI binding language that I actually like - and this makes it better.

It really looks like Oracle is putting a lot of effort into JavaFX - I plan to start porting all my Swing apps ASAP, and see how it goes.  Now I wish I'd had a cleaner separation of UI and logic :(

"You want to attend that keynote"

In between sessions, I was chatting with Mark Reinhold, and mentioned that I was “All this talk of JDK 7 is making me really hungry for it… but I’ve got a Mac.  Guess I’ll have to attend that strategic keynote tomorrow” (Mark had mentioned at this morning’s keynote that details on the Mac JDK 7 would be announced in Tuesday’s keynote). 

Mark just smiled and said, “You really want to attend that keynote”.

Keynote speakers

Some good stuff announced - Oracle is announcing it's NoSQL database today (!). Our DBAs will literally not know what to do about this. Should be fun.

Some interesting performance figures for Java 7 - some benchmarks are putting it at 3x the performance of Java 6 on Intel hadware. Free performance boosts are always good to hear. Now if I can just get a Java 7 port for OS X... they're going to announce timelines in tomorrow's "strategy" keynote. Damn, now I'll have to attend that one.

The JavaFX demos were quite good, too - they finally have tables! Some very slick integration with the browser, too - desktop full-screen applets running via Chrome.

JavaOne 2011

Just got into town, flew in from Portland on a little turboprop - very comfortable seats. Only defect was the bathroom, which was just plain cruel.

I'm staying at the Donatello this year - the rates were $180 via AAA, and it's only a block or so from the Hilton, etc on Mason Street. Quite nice, it's an older "boutique" hotel, but free wi-fi, modern room, fridge, microwave, and A/C - much better deal than the more expensive hotels.

The materials for JavaOne this year are a bump up from last year. The backpack is still a bit on the cheap side, but the alumni jacket is actually pretty nice, and the water bottle is something I'll actually use. IBM chipped in for that one.

The Donatello has an Italian restaurant, Zingari, which is supposed to be pretty good. Pricey, but why come to San Francisco if you're going to cheap out?