JavaOne Day 4

Toy Show

James Gosling hosted his "toy show" Friday morning. The actual toys were pretty impressive, I have to admit. User-programmable robots running Java. The guy from the company that makes them had three of them dance to "I Will Survive." Not nearly as slick as Honda's Asimo, but here's the kicker -- they were selling them for $269 in the show pavilion. So literally a toy, even if an expensive one, and for that, they were doing some pretty darn good dancing.

Fully autonomous underwater exploration vehicle with an Intel chip running Solaris and a JVM right on board, in a water-tight compartment. No wires and no human intervention whatsoever. They had it floating around in a fish tank at the show pavilion earlier in the conference. Built by students from an engineering school in Quebec, by the way. And I thought I was a dedicated student back in the day.

There were some less glorious-looking but arguably more marketable demos of software tools. Controlling print jobs on an Internet-enabled printer from your cell phone, stuff like that. I am sure there'll be a webcast here soon.

Developing an App in Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails and "Normal" Java.
This wasn't the exact title of the talk, but it captures the gist. A couple of Sun guys from Scotland developed a simple, though database-enabled, app using three different frameworks (here's that word again) right during the talk, and discussed briefly the pros and cons of each. The three were Ruby on Rails (though actually JRuby -- the distinction is significant), Groovy/Grails and Java 5 EE.

The demos were a little difficult to follow, but the talk was still pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it reinforced the impression that simple open-source frameworks like Rails, based on scripting languages like Ruby, are here to stay, and are being taken seriously. In fact, that was one of the presenters' conclusions. These will work -- more precisely, we'll have to make them work -- with more established enterprise technologies like Java EE. I tend to agree, maybe because that's the space we're mostly working at PSG.

Second, not all three are created equal, so to speak. JRuby and Rails support is now integrated into version 6 of NetBeans (beta) -- Sun's state of the art IDE (this is why the distinction between JRuby and the original is significant in this context). So Sun is clearly treating it as a first-class citizen. So during the demo, they actually used NetBeans to do their Ruby/Rails development, which is, I suspect, not how most average Ruby developers would do it. So inaccurate, one might argue. Still, gives you an idea.

Groovy/Grails, about which I knew nothing, by the way, is very young, and there is no tool support whatsoever. The presenter used vi to edit and ran everything at the command line. Still, he had something up and talking to the database in ten minutes or so. So the technology does work, apparently, though the jury is still out on how well. Apparently, it has excellent Java integration, but they didn't go into the details, so I can't really offer an opinion on that part.

The Java EE demo was also in NetBeans, and since that's what the tools is really optimized for, the tool basically did everything for them in a few clicks. Despite this, their conclusion was that doing a real, industry-strength app would take longer and be more expensive when done this way.

All in all, an informative talk, though the comparisons were more than a little contrived, I thought.

Well, this is kind of it. I've got one more session I'm signed up for -- on that new JavaFX scripting thing -- I guess I'll have to write it up when I get back. I might get lazy and just watch the webcast, though. I'll write up some sort of summary/conclusion when I get back, too.

Have a great weekend. I'll see everyone on Monday.

-- Tony