I usually come back from JavaONE with pictures, this year, I switched to video.

Enjoy !

I had the pleasure to present a Hands-on-Lab during this year’s JavaONE conference.  My lab teaches attendees how to develop an AJAX portlet with the NetBeans IDE, Google Web Toolkit and the Open-Source Portlet Conainer.

Beside some frustrations to actually install the environment required for the lab, all went well and most of the attendees managed to finish the exercises on time.

The good news today is that all JavaONE 2008 Hands-on-Lab are now available for free on Sun Developer’s Network, you just need to register to get access to the site.

The AJAX Portlet lab is available as well as a couple of slides giving a high level overview of the lab.

As usual, feel free to share your comments and suggestions.

Enjoy !

Last May, more than 15.000 Java fans gathered in San Francisco for the 12th edition of JavaOne. If you haven’t been able to attend JavaOne, Sun Microsystems Luxembourg is inviting you to its first JavaOne AfterGlow for Luxembourg. During this full day, you will learn more about the latest trends and new technologies introduced during JavaOne like JavaFX. You also will get a technical introduction on some evolutions of the Java Platform (EJB 3.x, JAX-RS – RESTful API fort Java, etc. see below)

This event is free for everyone, you can register online now. 

I failed to respect the obligation I made to myself to write at least one blog entry per day during this JavaONE 2007 conference.  Main reasons are that, given a certain point into the conference, you’re going from general sessions to technical sessions to BOF’s.  You’re meeting people, exchanging ideas and business cards, meeting experts and leaders from our community.  In other words simple stuffs like eating, sleeping or … blogging are secondary.  I hit that point yesterday 🙂

My day #3 was all about Glassfish, the open source Java application server contributed by Sun and the community.  Version 2.0 is  available as a beta (expect final release by end of calendar year).  v2.0’s main focus are high availability and load balancing, features already available in Sun’s Application Server 7 and 8 (these are pre-Glassfish releases).
Glassfish v2.0 will be a enterprise-ready, open-source application server, allowing to provide for highly available deployments and being able to scale the load across several application server’s instances.  Glassfish v2.0 also adds some features not previously available in previous versions of Sun’s application server (at least, not officially supported), like in memory replication of statefull information between application server’s instances. Statefull information includes HTTP sessions, statefull session beans and SSO session information.  Surprisingly, this in memory replication in implemented on top of the JXTA framework.  Yes, that JXTA, the open-source peer-to-peer technology, contributed by Sun.  Here the peers are application server’s instances.

My day#4 was split between James Gosling tradition General Session showcasing fun and unexpected Java applications developed across the world.  I have to admit I arrived a little bit late to this session and I missed the first half of it.  Reason is that I ended yesterday night at that place called the Holy Cow.  Great fun, many (too many ?) cocktails and a very short night 🙂
I then attended an excellent session hosted by Romain and Chet about creating nice looking GUI’s with Swing, Java2D and Java3D.  This session was a kind of teaser for their forthcoming book : Filthy Rich Clients.
I closed this year’s JavaONE with a Verisign talk about OpenID.  By the way, I failed to mention earlier that Sun announced last Monday that they will start an openID provider for the employees  Every single employee will have a Sun-hosted OpenID.  This will allow partner sites (like Safari, The Apple Store) to securely recognize a Sun employee, without necessary requiring to know who we really are.

As usual, pictures are posted to my Flickr account.

Day #2 was my SOA/JBI day.

It was for me the occasion to discover the non-Sun solutions, in particular the Oracle offering and the offerings from the open-source community.
On the Sun side, a very complete presentation from my colleague Michael about SOA Governance and our SOA Governance Framework.

For the first time it was mentioned in front of a public audience that Sun is considering open-sourcing SGF as a java.net project.  More on this later on.

As usual, I posted some additional pictures.

I just posted some of yesterday and today’s pictures on Flickr.  Don’t hesitate to comment 🙂

Some other cool stuffs demoed during Bob’s session this afternoon :

You know Google Earth ?  Now there is also NASA World Win.  The later is entirely implemented on top of Java SE and Java 3D.  Icing on the cake : it is delivered as Swing component with a very simple API allowing you to create mash-ups with your own applications. 

A nice cool Photo Editing software that runs entirely in a browser, all written in Java and nothing installed in your machine : IRIS. Source code will soon appear on http://iris.dev.java.net.  This application was build in a couple of weeks.  A JavaFX version was also demoed.  It was built in a couple of days.

JavaFXMobile, a complete platform built on top of a linux kernel, Java SE and JavaFX aimed at OEMs  to create the next generation of mobile devices. 

I am just leaving the general session that kicks of this year’s JavaONE conference.
As usual, this gigantic Java rock show was the vector for a series of announcements from Sun

• The open-sourcing of the Java SE platform is complete. Sun now delivers a set of sources that you can build and compile : OpenJDK.
  Sun also announce the setup of a temporary Governance Board that will work on defining the Governance Process for this community.
• Sun is entering into the Rich Internet Applications market with a scripting language allowing to create rich internet content on top of standard Java SE or Java ME platform. This is called JavaFX and will include soon-to-be-released appropriate tooling to make our life easier and our work more productive.

I will post my pictures on Flickr later today.
Some figures grabbed during the show :

• NASDAQ is running 150.000+ transactions per second on their Java based trading systems
• Java developer community is now over 6 million 

Now that the Java platform is GPLed, what is the impact for developers ?
Tim Bray (Sun employee and father of XML) was kind enough to give his perspective.