Devoxx 2009 - Day 3

Day 3 is the first real conference day. It started with a keynote

from Oracle which really gave no real new insights, since nobody is allowed to say anything at all. But just in case - a subset of the slides is available here. Did you recognize the tie on that "Orange Guy"?

Next was a presentation of Adobe on their new Catalyst tool (Fc) - Chat Haase did a real nice stand up again.

The main breaking news of the day came from Mark Reinhold in his update for JDK 7. Not only will it take longer to get JDK 7 out (due to the obvious reasons) but it even may contain closures. So once again it seems closures is the new pink.

After lunch James Gosling had his un-keynote. He demoed the new version of the JavaStore promising that it will be available worldwide ASAP, but no sooner.

During James talk some novelity happened at Devoxx - the first time in 8 years the audiosystem broke. So James had to wait for them fixing the problem, but the Devoxx-Magicians got it up and running again in no time (=few minutes).

Next up was a JavaFX session with Rich Bair, Jasper Potts and special guest Tor Norbye. They showed the planned features for JavaFX 1.3- regions with css styling support, new enterprise ready ui components and some smaller enhancements for threading. The eyecatcher was the demo from Tor. He showed the JavaFX Visual DesignTool, written completely (100%?) in JavaFX. I have to figure out how to build such a large application without a platform like NetBeans RCP (have to ask Tor). It was a real slick UI with lot of effects and , as it seemed to me, with ease of use.

For the afternoon the sessions were ScalaTest and Project Coin. Bill Venners talk showed how easy it can be to write easy understandable test with Scala - but I agree with James Gosling - you have to hear it 5(?) times to get it all right. the Project Coin session did not reveal many new details but showed how the process worked, made clear that not only because it looks simple to do a change it is that simple (the JLS complexity indicator from Alex Buckley). One new piece of information was that they may be considering further small changes, e.g. multicatch, due to the slip of OpenJDK 7 release.

Only two BOF's for day 3 - the JUG BOF with James Gosling (a must have) and the JDK 7 BOF with Alex Buckley, Brian Goetz, Joseph Darcy and Mark Reinhold.

The main things I took with me? Well Java was invented to trick C/C++ programmers into thinking Smalltalk was cool thing and no Java is not the new COBOL.

For the evening we had a meetup (hosted by the NetBeans DreamTeam) at the Axxes - and guess who was there - Juggy!

Was real good to meet you all again!

Winning Duke's Choice and James Gosling's Keynote

By now, you could have read it all over the blogosphere - I have been part of James Gosling's keynote "Toy Show" at JavaOne, as a winner of the Duke's Choice Award.



The full video of the keynote is available at the JavaOne website.

The most important chapter can be found below.





Before the keynote I have been interviewed for the BlogTalkRadio - only it wasn't for the radio - it was full video. So here is the interview.




This was a really amazing week - more blog entries to follow.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / How NetBeans Saved the Day

... at least for a real unlucky - or perhaps a real lucky guy - read on and fond out for yourself.

Emil Ong from Caucho was up for a talk about PHP on Java showing how to use Java's abilities (and the performance of the underlying JVM) to make PHP integratable/coexisitng with existing Java WebApps on one application Server. This approach is based on Quercus, which is Caucho’s 100% pure Java implementation of PHP.
At the start of the session he already had difficulties getting his laptop to work, but finally got it up and running showing his presentation. Then suddenly somwhere right in the middle of the session his system got stuck switching to the next slide. Rebooting did not really help - so he asked the audience if anybody would lend him/hers laptop. The first try failed (seemed to be some problem with the USB-Drive) so he went for another one.
This is where the story gets interesting. Toni Epple from the NetBeans Dream Team had already met Emil last night on the Devoxx dinner and they had set up Resin/Quercus/NetBeans to work together during a break at the Cauch booth, so that PHP can be deployed with NetBeans to Quercus/Resin (read Toni's blog for more details). So he lend Emil his "trusty new and shiny MacBook" and having figured out the difficulties with the language of the operating system and one display-cable-adapter later the presentation could continue. At the end of this real interesting talk (come on PHP developers - give it a try) he was sorry to announce that the prepared demo could not be shown, since his laptop did not work. So Toni took the opportunity and proposed to show their setup with NetBeans/Quercus and Resin. So Toni just showed the PHP project he had created for Wordpress in NetBeans and just clicked "Run" and that's it - Wordpress was running on Quercus and Resin. What a cool Demo. So that is how NetBeans saved the day - and I think Emil is a lucky guy - he learned about NetBeans and the always helpful Dream Team.

You do not believe this? See for yourself