Darwin's Theories Blog

New Theories for a New Time

JavaOne Summary

2007-05-11
Too much to take in in one week
This has been a very busy week at JavaOne, with lots of new announcments but few major ones. One of the largest announcements was a small but powerful technology called JavaFX, which is potentially very significant because it provides a compositional API for Java 2D, similar to that for Swing. Java 2D has always been powerful but underused because  of its programmatic API. JavaFX aims to make this capability available on the client side of the web, to compete with technologies like Adobe Flex and Microsoft's Silver-whatever. It looks promising, and the all-Java PDF reader they showed was nice, but I fear it may be "too little, too late" in the web market. JavaFX will certainly shine where people are already using Swing. The current version is interpreted but there are plans to compile it to Java bytecode.

Also announced was the "Java Kernel" and new deployment. Many other major vendors had things to show: Ricoh was showing off their JavaME-powered printer/copiers; lots of cell-phone companies; lots of software tools vendors. Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and other companies adorned the trade show.

The session schedule was brutal; there were few times when I didn't want to attend three or four talks at the same time. Maybe I'm interested in too many different topics. Some sessions filled up and people were turned away. The one talk I gave ran at full capacity, but they gave me a tiny room with only room for about 250 people; the talk seemed to go well and I got very positive verbal feedback from a dozen or so people after.

All in all, a really good show with few unexpected major announcements but a lot of incremental growth.
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