JavaPolis 2007 - Day 3

That was an interesting morning today. Everything went as planned and we arrived so early we had a lot of time left for a nice breakfast, filling out a survey at the SUN booth (getting a NetBeans 6 t-shirt that way) and answering some questions for the tomorrows edition of the Parleys magazin. Besides other very interesting things there are two things that grabbed our attentation - a NetBeans installation


and the friendly staff at the SUN booth providing free NetBeans 6 T-Shirts


Afterwards we got ourself a nice place to watch the todays keynote


- highlight: James Gosling.

There were some weird guys
and princesses out there


but in the end the keynote finally started. Before James Gosling took over we first had a very nice introduction from Stephan Janssen to JavaPolis and the future (Hope to come back next year). To make a long story short - these are the central messages I took with me from James Goslings' keynote

• Java is Fun
• Closures are sexy
• NetBeans is better than sex
• ..and something about when we last had an erection during presentation (maybe I got that wrong ;-) - perhaps I should replay the video)
  

Following this session we had a onverview about the things going on with OpenJDK - given from
Mark Reinhold. Pretty much is obviously in work - but lawyers aren't always helpful. But they are pretty sure to get all this encumbered stuff sorted out and a JDK7 project in OpenJDK has officially been started.

For lunch we had some hotdogs - so more lightweight food today.

The afternoon started with a further UI centric presentation Filthy Makeover by Chet Haase. It covered his Filthy Rich Client and Extreme GUI Makeover presentations and show some real slick things you can do with gradients and other Java2D effects. With this done a more project management session was on the agenda - Scrum in practice for non-believers. I hoped that this may turn me into a real believer - but it seems I am staying a skeptic for a bit longer since it does not seem to work for all projects. You have to have at least the right customer. The Future of Computing Panel was a fun thing to watch - the "Java Rock Stars" taking turns on picking at each other - felt quite familiar ;-)

Then there were two interesting BOFS concerning new language features for Java - Neal Gafter talking about the current state of his closure specification and implementation. It is fairly complete and can be download here. Give it a try and find out yourself if you love it or hate it. Afterwards Stephen Colebourne provided some infos on his new project which allows easy access to integrate new features into javac - for trying new things. You can find more info here. Afterwards we just called it a day and had some nice chatting over our free beer.


I forgot to tell you about the videos. All presentations are recorded and will be free available via parleys.com. So stay tuned - I think there was no time frame given.