JavaOne & OracleDevelop, one of the premiere technology conferences was organized on May 3 & May 4 at HICC, Hyderabad. I took a break from my Office-Home-Office schedule & got a chance to attend the conference. Two days of knowledge overflow, with sessions by some of the best Java minds/evangelists (wow!) in the business.
Day 1 started with JavaOne sponsor keynote by Gerard J Rego, he emphasized on the importance of mobile computing & applications and Nokia’s contributions in this area. There was a big round of applause for Santosh Ostwal who spoke about his innovation on mobile controlled water pumps even with low cost Nokia phones. It was an unbelievable achievement given the fact that be belonged to a poor farmer’s family in a remote village.
Nandini Ramani and Anil Gaur presented the keynote for Java technologies. Anil Gaur spoke about the project Avatar which involved HTML5 as well. Nandini talked about J2ME technology & how Oracle is working towards converging J2ME and J2SE, which was followed by Angela Caicedo‘s talk about the scene builder for JavaFx and demonstrated the gesture controlled duke app in iPad written using JavaFx (marvelous it was!). The bottom line here was the usability of JavaFx in creating platform independent UI applications.
After the keynotes, it was time for the attendees to choose sessions of their interest among many running in parallel (i wished to attend all), i started off with “Introduction to JavaFx 2.0″ by Angela Caicedo (i still had the hangover of gesture controlled iPad app), it was good to know the paradigm shift of JavaFx from a scripting language in 1.0 version to a Java API in 2.0. After this, i went into a hall where David Holmes presented the fork/join parallelism framework who later on gave a session on Project Lambda as well (this was the most interesting session overall). This session made me feel that Java is trying to go the functional programming way with closures coming up in Java 8, but giving a serious thought to it, you understand how beautifully these concepts will be introduced all the OOP’s way. Simon Ritter presented the keynote on JavaFx.The most interesting part was the demonstration of JavaFX on Raspberry Pi. Last session of the day was by Marcus Hirt who was originally involved in creation of JRockit virtual machine when they were students in their start up company Appeal Virtual Machines. It was very inspiring meeting him. He talked about HotRockit virtual machine which is coming up from Oracle.
In the evening the OTN night was quite entertaining with performances from standup comedian Vipul Goyal, Singer Vasundhara Das and top Indian Idol singer Meiyang Chang.
Day 2 began with panel discussion session with Arun Gupta, and other JavaFx experts. David Peake delivered the Oracle Develop keynote and stressed on Oracle Public Cloud. Next was probably the most interesting session of the day, Stephen Chin and Kevin Nelson discussed why HTML5 and JavaFx are not alternatives, they can be married together for low effort, rich web application leveraging the capabilities of both the technology.
This was followed by yet another interesting session on JavaScript on JDK by Sundarajan. He talked about Nashorn – running JS code seamlessly on JVM. Jay Suri’s session on “Java Beyond IDE” focused on the production time challenges in Java and performance monitoring with Flight Recorder. The day ended with a session on Java SWOT by Harshad Oak, only person to criticize J2ME & few other oracle products (he was not an oracle employee like others 
).
Overall, these two days where good in more than lot of ways, signing off with a hope to see more of such sessions!
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1 comment
Les
July 25, 2012 at 2:52 PM (UTC 8.5) Link to this comment
I have to say that I’m quite excited about the annomnceuent. Admittedly, I’ve only dabbled in JavaFX (nothing commercial), so I don’t have much to lose from the dropping of JavaFX Script. I liked a lot of what the language provided; however, what I really wanted was to be able to write JavaFX in Scala.Since JavaFX in Scala is now more likely to happen, I’m pretty happy.It seems to me that Oracle have made the right decisions. JavaFX Script is problematic since most people will mix Java and JavaFX in large applications anyway and this isn’t as easy as it should be.Open-sourcing JavaFX script and giving it to the community makes it another language for the JVM, not necessarily tied to JavaFX. It gives it parity with Groovy, Scala, Clojure, etc, giving people the choice to use it or not for their JavaFX applications. My guess (for what it’s worth) is that it’ll die a slow death as developers favour Groovy and Scala (or Clojure for those who think the world can’t have too many parentheses).