JavaOne Live Report (June 11) __java

Without the crowd of crowds, without the media of the FRY, without the myth of the tree off the gold coins, Java one in a slightly deserted at the same time also returned to the essence of technical meetings. The most important theme of the Java One Congress is "the future direction of Java", and Sun has a great action for the Java language itself, for EE platform, for development tools. The foreign Java community likened. NET's attack to "Empire Strikes Back", while Java one, of course, is "The Return of the Jedi Knight"-does this metaphor mean that Microsoft and Sun are originally family?

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Theserverside@javaone 2003

by Dion Almaer, Nitin Bharti, Stuart Charlton, Doug Bateman, Frank Cohen .

June 2003
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protesting for accelerated Development

There is quite a spectacle Tuesday morning as you approached the Moscone Center for the morning keynote. What seemed like a protest against third-world hunger is in fact quite the opposite. A boisterous group of hippies clad in tie-dyed T-shirts and sporting headbands were beating their drums and blowing their Horns to quite a different tune:easing and accelerating development through OPTIMALJ, Compuware ' s model-based developmen T environment. The hippies religiously handed out psychedelic-coloured buttons while chanting ' optimalj!! ' and waved placards ' 40% faster ' and ' Visit us in booth #813 '.

The expected hoopla by the big vendors is a little toned down, almost non-existent on opening day. This is taxis emblazoned with BEA logos and flatbed trucks wheeling around large Sun and Bea signs could is SE En circling the Moscone Center. As far as spectacles go, Compuware definitely took "show on" Day 1. But who knows what surprises lurk during the coming days?

What you Won ' t is in this year's JavaOne No more elbow to elbow crowds from two years ago. Faced with slashed budgets and disappointing reviews from past conferences, many developers opted s conferences. Yet those who took the plunge and attended this year's JavaOne conference'll find this extremely refreshing as you can M Ove about from technical talk to technical talk without-fending off the herds.

No more media extravaganza. You are won ' t find Sun pushing their latest approach towards. Instead the focus has moved to core Java and the JCP. Developers seeking to distill fluff from stuff'll certainly find this a welcome relief.

No more money dripping off trees. This is the year ' s JavaOne backpacks are certainly disappointing. But we ' re glad Sun has finally decided to invest of the money in the areas which the really matter.

What you'll be. Exciting content ...

Morning General Session:java ' s Future Bright, New Sun portals

JavaOne 2003 kicked off Tuesday morning with a general session hosted by Jonathan Schwartz and John Fowler of Sun. The overall tone of the presentations showed how far Java has matured over the years. The demonstrations looked sharp, clean, and seamless. The demonstration showed a very good performance improvement overall.

Schwartz noted that Java developers are building end-to-end applications so they expect the platforms (J2ME, J2SE, ee) t o be more uniform than they are today. As an example, J2ME is designed in isolation from the others. Sun wants the development community to expect more uniformity across the components of the Java platform.

From solely a Java perspective, the morning section covered IDE vendor support for JavaServer Faces (JSR 127) and Not a whole lot. Oracle and Borland showed very cool demonstrations to how their respective IDE ' s support javeserver.

Sun is releasing JavaCC (a parser compiler,) Sage, Jax-b, and jax-p under a Open-source license.

On the Web Services front Sun announced a bunch of things:that Java EE 1.4 would with WS-I Basic profile. WS-I implements a subset of the Web Service protocols (SOAP, WSDL, etc.). While Java-EE would adopt WS-I Basic profile, they'll continue supporting Jax-RPC and JAXM. This tells me that developers would have a choice of Web Service APIs. One possible downside of the choice is interoperability problems.

They indicated that Javeserver Faces and JAXB are destined to is part of the Java EE 1.5 specification.

Sun said to expect better support for document-literal encoding in Web Services to better support interoperability with. N ET Web Services.

Work being done on the a new technology to improve Web Service performance. Fast Web Services (FWS) does not with XML on the wire. Instead the end-points would negotiate which encoding to use:standards based SOAP or FWS binary. So if two Java applications are enabled with FWS the end-points would learn this they can handle FWS binary data. That is saves time on encoding and decoding XML. Sun would present this to a standards body sometime in the future.

On the marketing front, Sun be reworking its Web properties. Http://www.java.com is the new consumer portal to the latest Java runtime. Http://www.java.net is the new developer portal to share Java code. Java.net looks pretty cool. It includes blogs, wikis, forums and a nice upload/download library.

Technical Keynote:future Directions for the Java Platform

Tuesday ' s technical keynote layed out of future for Java SE, EE, and ME. And the message is clear. The days of Java innovation and cutting edge advancement are. If. NET threat were likened to "the Empire Strikes Back", then Java 1.5 would is the "return of the Jedi".

Now, the focus, seems to have shifted away from Sun's desperate search for a viable model and business the onto and Meeting what developers want, we ' re seeing a whole the new level of excitement. Today's technical keynote illustrated Java ' s new priorities of increasing-Developer productivity (the EoD or Ease of Devel Opment Initiative) and building frameworks that simplify the tasks this developers are facing everyday to the Traditional priorities of improving performance, adding features, and improving JRE quality.

Developers in the audience repeatedly interrupted the speaker with spontaneous cheers and rounds of applause as new Java 1 .5 (codenamed "Tiger") language enhancements where introduced, Including:meta-data, generics, For-each style iterators, E Numerated Types, Autoboxing, and out.printf (); The technical keynote also layed out Java ' s exciting New Agenda for J2ME and EE, focusing on ease of the Needs of developers. The future of Java looks very promising.

ts-1102:j2ee or. Net-an objective Technology Comparison

If you saw the session title, your might ' ve thought ' Wow, can it really be objective? ". That hope would is disspelled right away, as the humourous Brit presentor out started "Sun saying actually the bought That I would make a objective comparison. More Fool them! ". The talk is very slick and funny, quite different from the ' developer who just wants to code but has to present as he/she Works for Sun. The presenter worked for Oracle, but he didn ' t plug a much more TOO 9iAS.

The talk was basically a "Your managers would ask about. NET. Don ' t let it get into your dev culture!.

He believes that's manifesto that we Java developers have is:we believe in choice we believe in heterogenous systems we Believe in competition we believe in open standards we believe in platform neutrality we believe in community process

He knows the Microsoft are out there GIVING AWAY technology. He showed this by throwing out candy/sweets to the audience (buying them). The chocolate, then eventually you, addicted, and need it. This is thinks the Microsoft is moving.

A large part of the talk is "showing to beat Microsoft". He pointed out of that. NET are not Java EE. If you are have to compare, compare the entire stack:hardware-> OS-> App Server-> stack. This shows so if you are in to Microsoft have no options. If you buy into Java EE, you can work on different hardware (not just Intel), different OS "(Not just Windows [don t claim Mo No], different app servers [not just Windows Server 2003], different higher level products [Portal servers etc]).

He attacked the statements:

". NET are more productive": This conception revolves around visualstudio.net, but that isn ' t productivity as a whole ... bu T rather one piece (good at GUI).

'. NET is cheaper ': even through the. NET Framework may ' free ', consider the other Costs:os, Server, Tools, QoS [e.g. C Lustering]

He doesn ' t is the app server should is bound in a OS. How can I test your app on various. NET versions?

How come Sun doesn ' t have a evangelist as good as this?

java Server Faces and "The Java Way"

Craig McLanahan ' s Java Server Faces session is extremely down attended, completely packed with standers on all sides of T He room.

From one perspective, Java Server Faces ' existence really could is seen as a response to ASP.net Web controls. This probably ignores the "developments in" community in the general direction of what JSF provides, but asp.net Certainly served as a catalyst of promoting these efforts into a formal JSR.

This conferences seems to is pushing a subtext in J2SE 1.5 and Java EE 1.4: "We" going to take. NET what do, and go b Eyond The typical Java Way-by adding opportunities for pluggability, portability, extensibility. It's "Embrace and extend", Sun-style.

It's obvious, for example, that's the new Java 1.5 language features are designed to bring Java to is on-par with C # ' s Popul AR features. Furthermore, JSF provides a good example of this "embrace and extend" approach:it takes a very similar page rendering mod El to ASP.net, by constructing A's UI components, and then walking the tree to render the resulting user interface. It manages the page ' s state through either storing the "tree in the" JSP session scope, or by storing the state in a hidden form field, an approach nearly identical to the "ViewState" approach found in asp.net.

In terms of pluggability, JSF has the notion of renderers and renderkits to provide a pluggable UI description language, W Hether HTML, WML, or practically anything you want. This is similar to Swing ' s approach of splitting their GUI components into jcomponent and uicomponent, where the actual PA Inting responsibility lies in the uicomponent.

The one tradeoff to this typical Java approach of making everything as generic and pluggable as possible be that they ' re t Rying to make their the APIs to is all things to all people. It strikes me that the asp.net approach is to develop a product and then emerge a. The Java community Process approach is to design a (unusually good quality) specification and hope that vendor Place would step up, deliver a innovative implementation of the spec, and find out where the spec could be improved the NE XT Time around.

In practice, though, I ' m not so sure if the vendors actually does always step up to the plate. Sometimes they do, but sometimes Sun actually has to push customer requests down the vendor ' s throats by actually baking t He requests into the next version of the spec. It certainly makes for interesting drama and but slows innovation in the platform.

It's striking, the similarity between JSF and the Apple webobjects framework ... yet another example of how it's taken year s for industry standards to where Apple/next is in 1996.

JDO Gossip

There has already been talk of JDO at the conference. As we know, Sun doesn ' t seem to quite know where JDO fits into it's picture, but maybe it has more of Their vision is to "simplify" the Java platform.

An inside source told us, the "guy who has the say" wanted to kill JDO this time last year. At a meeting with the Java EE licensee ' s yesterday, he brought it up. "What should we do with JDO?". An Oracle employee said "shoot it through", and someone else came back with "we users are asking for it". Just The fact that's head honcho is talking about JDO are a good thing for it.

The JDO 2.0 is about to get ramped up, and it is the the time to come out with something everyone would be proud of.

BoF session:ask The EE experts

All of the usual suspects from the various specs this make up Java EE were on tap for questions. Bill Shannon, Mark Hapner, and Linda Demichiel answered the majority of the questions that were.

What is interesting about the session were two facts:people keep asking the same questions-"Can I really don't do Fil e I/O in EJB? " "What is better ... using a HTTPSession, or Stateful session Beans" ... insert other questions that have been asked since Java-EE 1.1 ...

Does this mean people are dumb? No. It means that the information isn ' t being disseminated as as as the it could to be.

Why don ' t we get the kind of info throughout, instead of just at a BoF? Throughout the talk, we basically heard (if you read a little between the lines):

JAXM is basically dead, and Jax-RPC is the "Now", the future, and noone cares about JAXM JDO *may* be included in Java EE 1.5, but not in EJB 3.0. [More about JDO below] JavaServer Faces'll probably be in Java 1.5 The Jcache API is ' basically dead ' [Is this true? Cameron?] If you are want to do something "different", use the Java EE Connector architecture to do whatever you want! :)

Would the new "more open" JCP would enable more info-to-to-outside world? If the Truth (tm) is put out there, then we won ' t have to keep hearing the same questions- ll for some of them:)

There was a lot of talk about "ease of development", the recurring theme of the "the" the "the" Meta data is used quite a bit in the various areas of Java (e.g. EJB). People asked about the logistics of this ... for example:

"It sounded like tools would take in metadata and deployment descriptors would is generated, which could be tweaked. Isn ' t this a problem as it comes to round-tripping? If We tweak the descriptor, what happens when we regen things?

It came out this there is a LOT to talk about wrt how metadata'll really work with Java. Would it just live in the class files, acting as defaults and such? Or would DD ' s be generated? The ANSWER:TBD.

Linda made an interesting dig in XDoclet when she said this she "had seen some XDoclet examples, where it just looked like The entire deployment desciptor had been into the Bean class ". People cheered at that one. They are going to is VERY careful at the how They work into Java EE.

Jdo:a couple of people asked "would JDO is part of Java?" and questions like that. Again, it is good to hear Bill Shannon the state this he felt there could is room for it. He polled the audience, asking ' Who's would like to the IT in Java? ' [votes], and "who would don't like the it in Java?" [2 votes].

Bill Shannon made a dig at JBoss, where a question asked to the panel turned out to be a bug (not fixed) from JBoss 3. Bill said "Try using a Java EE server".

Ejb:linda was great in answering questions, and I look forward to her EJB BoF. She did give a few pieces of info that were interesting already:ejb QL are going to being looked at a LOT. Expect dynamic EJB-QL, bulk updates/deletes, and subselects for EJB 3.0

Read only entity beans? Here we are come [lots of transaction isolation level work has to is ironed out for this one] She seems very open to making EJ B a *lot* easier. EJB 3.0 'll be great!

The Web Services:jax-rpc is the future. 2.0 'll have support for many messaging models, more importantly async modes!

The Borland Party

After a long day of attending keynotes, sessions and walking the pavilion, your may have found yourself in need of a lit Tle down time, alpha unwind, have a couple of drinks, and digest the day's events. The Borland party, at Club NV in downtown San Francisco, is the perfect place to does this. Other than the high ratio of men to women (many of whom were still sporting their javaone), and the passes large L Ogo flickering on the wall and this is just like no other party. A Live band kept the crowd going with funky renditions of popular ' s songs. As the drinks were on Borland, the bar is pretty packed and through the immense crowd, you could catch a glimpse of some Well-known Java figureheads laughing it up.