Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz promises to open source more of Java (again), Ajax has been cleaning up with attendance, and the NetBeans IDE can see through illusions; that and much more has been going on in San Francisco this week.
Virtually everyone attending JavaOne must have sat in those bean bags and watched the big screens at the Moscone Center by now. With the conference half-completed (or should that be half-remaining?), and the bean bags shaped to a variety of butt grooves, long-time Java guy and author Robert Eckstein listed some must-sees for the remainder of JavaOne, like the MythBusters crew at the Thursday After Dark session or the SavaJe cellphone that’s selling out quickly.
New Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and executive VP of software Rich Green both emphasized that, at some point, Java will be opened up. Right now they aren’t sure how to do it without risking compatibility problems, or worse a forking of the code.
Sun has promised to do this several times in the past, but it still hasn’t happened despite repeated calls from its userbase to do so. Neither executive provided a timetable to doing this, beyond announcing an Operating System Distributor’s License for Java that should better suit the needs of Linux distributors.
Eckstein also noted how attendees packed the “Introduction to Ajax” session on opening day. “Did you know how easy it was to work with AJAX? Did you know that you could implement your own version of Google Maps in less than 250 lines of code?” he wrote.
Ajaxian.com founders Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer presented that session to a packed room. They demonstrated how Ajax is not difficult to work with or implement, and that offline modes of operation can be accomplished with cached pages and data in an embedded Java database like Apache Derby.
Google employees Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter, also known as the Type-It Brothers, Click and Hack, provided some of the punch for the NetBeans Software Day. They showed the audience a number of optical illusions, and then related how pieces of code can sometimes function differently than expected.
A new module for the NetBeans IDE, called Jackpot, will work like a very advanced “FindBugs plus Refactoring on steroids” to find and fix those illusionary code bugs. That can be found at the Jackpot module’s website.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
