There is no place like San Francisco in September. But aside from blue skies, I can say as someone who has been part of JavaOne since 1996 that I’m ecstatic that our newly acquired focus is returning to our roots — The JDK (7 & ~8). Our plans for the technology will be revealed, uncut and without the cloud of uncertainty that hung over the last couple JavaOnes. I think you may find it refreshing.
As evidence refuting the rumor that all smart people work at one Mt.View company, the session catalog has a wealth of interesting talks, but here’s a handful of sessions that pique my interest in the Java language and client technologies:
Monday (Dueling openers!):
- 10am: JDK 7 and Java SE 7 (S314556) Mark Reinhold/Oracle
- 10am: JavaFX 2.0 (S319383) Richard Bair/Oracle, Jai Suri/Oracle, Jasper Potts/Oracle, Nicolas Lorain/Oracle (fortunately this one is being given again on Thursday@12:30 if you don’t want to miss Mark’s)
- 11:30am: Project Coin: Small Language Changes for the JDK (S313504), Maurizio Cimadamore/Oracle & Joseph Darcy/Oracle
- 1:00pm: HTML5 and Java: Opening the Door to New Possibilities (S314629), Bernard Traversat/Oracle
- 4:00pm: JavaFX Your Way: Building JavaFX Applications with Alternative Languages (S319370), Stephen Chin/Inovis & Jonathan Giles/Oracle
Tuesday
- 8:00am: Using JavaFX 1.3 Controls (S317802), Stuart Marks/Oracle & Paru Somashekar/Oracle
- 1:00pm: The Concurrency Revolution: The Hardware Story (S314037), Brian Goetz/Oracle & Cliff Click/Azul Systems
Wednesday
- 10:00am: Working with JavaFX Media (S314774), Loc Nguyen, Brian Burkhalter
- 11:30am: Project Lambda: To Multicore and Beyond (S313289), Alex Buckley/Oracle & Brian Goetz/Oracle (yes, I’m a BG fan)
- 1:00pm: Creating Great-Looking Java Apps for Mac OS X Without Learning Objective-C (S314232), Deane Richan/Xito
- 2:15pm: JFXtras: JavaFX Controls, Layouts, Services, and More (S312919), Dean Iverson/Pleasing Software & Stephen Chin/Inovis
- 4:45pm: JavaFX Graphics (S313960), Kevin Rushforth/Oracle & Jim Graham/Oracle (this is the stuff that graphics geeks love)
Thursday
- 11:00am: Hardcore Cascading Style Sheets with JavaFX (S314306), Richard Bair/Oracle & Jasper Potts/Oracle
- 12:30pm: Rich GUI Testing Made Easy (S313501), Yvonne Price/Guidewire Software & Alex Ruiz/Oracle
This will likely be the most interesting JavaOne in years. I’m already looking forward to lunch at Henry Hunan’s.
Aim's Blog 
i wonder where is Chris Oliver.
I wish we were all as optimistic as you. With the looming Google lawsuit and the expectation of a JDK 7 release candidate at Javaone I can’t think of any good news to come; at least not for a very long time. It’s sad that you guys have let Java the language rot out like it has.
I really hope you prove me wrong at Javaone.
When you say theres a new renewed interest in the core of the JDK that doesnt seem to have spread much love Swings way. Just heard that the alleged Swing/Swinglabs lead Alexp won’t be present at the Swinglabs update (or at JavaOne?) isn’t clear that anyone from the Swing team is taking his place or has any news to quell the growing disquiet? http://tinyurl.com/3aejcf5 and the related poll showing the majority feel its been mismanaged.
Hi Amy,
I don’t see any Swing related things on the list, I’ve been working with Swing in one way or another for the past 10 years, and I love the flexibility of it. I haven’t felt like JavaFx is a substitution for swing (maybe just because I have limited experience in it), and I am wondering if there are any plans of a next generation Swing, or at least evolution of existing Swing, or does all the focus go into JavaFX nowadays?
Do you think that JFX will replace Swing as the preferred Java desktop solution one day, or are they targeting different solution spaces all together? (web v.s. Desktop)
(Swing surely could use binding, simple app framework, better Layouts, component builders, Generic components/models, Better components like multi column sort tables, a real treetable (could actually be the go to solution that replaces JTable, JTree and a vertical JList), (better) filters on JTable, JTree, JList, List (util), et.c. )
Another letdown, imho. More sessions about JavaFX than about Java and JDK together?
Plus, you can’t possibly resurrect that without proper modularization of Java itself. Unless you’re thinking making it another bloatware like other Oracle proprietary stuff is going to make it popular.
Yes we RIA developers are (deadly) waiting for “refreshing news”.
As much as we had in the last 2 javaone….
Sadly Amy, I must say I was a bit astonished by last week’s saying that java 7 was [again] pushed back…. to mid 2010. Wouha … 😦
I honnestly find that any move from OracleSun (new API like javaFx, revanped old good-old-swing, marketing,..) toward a fresh new way for developers to build cool Front-End-GUI will still be crushed until the cold start of jvm does not get really FASTER.
Just take for ewample my demos Applets on free-visit.net ; I happen to have a brand new middle-cheap windows7 computer.
But still, my applets take at from 4 to 8 seconds to visualise in case of a cold JVM start.
Frstruting to slow for the web because my users maily stumble on a JVM-cold-start…
Now Amy be honest : Would you think Video-on-web-page would have the same success if Flash had a cold start as long as JVM ? I bet on a big NO.
Anyway good luck for next week.
Crossing my fingers for you girls-guys to annonce a game changer things.
We saw that with Apple a few years ago who went form almos-dead to 1st-class-leader.
Why not with also with OracleSun ? Everyone has a seconf chance I think.
So Go for it !
Thierry
I love the secrecy around JavaFX 2.0…and I love the fact that some comments of mine about using JavaFX in Java have been moderated on other important JavaFX blogs.
Finally !
(and btw, yes I’m a big AF fan)
Please focus on making the JVM really solid. I’ve already moved on to Scala for the language portion.
@all: I hear you. Hopefully some of you will be at JavaOne next week to hear the details and share your opinions in person.
Hi Amy,
needless to say that I’m still happy in Swing/X/Land, though not at j1 🙂 Hope our SwingLabs guys – Karl and Jan, unfortunately Alex will not be there – have/grab an opportunity to meet you for first-hand info.
Cheers
Jeanette
The details, I think we can ignore. The most important thing right now is for Oracle to share with us its vision for moving Java forward. Imho, Java is in an ok position on the market for now (mostly thanks to advances in JavaEE). But the market isn’t standing still.
A great deal of attention should be directed at tooling as well. Like IDEs. Right now we have Eclipse with rather poor support for modern stuff. And then we have Netbeans, which is much better. But it’s also slower and neglected (e.g. the UML editor was quietly dropped because of lack of resources; and when I tried to look into providing support myself, I couldn’t even find a link to get me started). I can only hope tooling is part of Oracle’s plan on moving forward…
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Pingback: Java desktop links of the week, September 18 | Jonathan Giles
Refocus on JDK and core Java is certainly a good move but it’s little bit too late. We won’t see Jigsaw till 2012. Without a good JVM, nothing else matters. We are moving off Java for our future client site development. JavaFX was a joke and still is. If I would have to pick a script language, it certainly would be ActionScript not JavaFX. Swing is the best, unfortunately Sun just didn’t realize its value. Even today, look at how many Java desktop clients are developed by using Swing and then check to see how many are being developed using JavaFX.
Well Jack, you won’t longer need to use JavaFX Script for JavaFX programs so that should make you happy 🙂
http://sellmic.com/blog/2010/09/21/goodbye-javafx-script-hello-javafx-2-0/
ok, so you surprised me with the JavaFX announcement. I thought fx script was a rather nice DSL but in the grand scheme of things I think this was a Good move by Oracle.
Hi Amy,
I saw that you were going to attend my session yesterday. I would have loved to have met you, and hear any tips or pointers you had on my session topic. I hope you are enjoying JavaOne this year, all though I find the feeling really just not the same 😦
Thanks,
Deane
@Deane – I ended up having another obligation from noon-2pm on wed, so, unfortunately for me, I had to miss your session. I hope you will present in future JavaOnes. I’m a mac devotee.
Sorry, I misread your post, hope you could attend my session 😉 Also I am very excited about the new direction for JavaFX it always seemed a shame to me that all the efforts swing/java programmers had made seem to be left behind with a switch to a new scripting language. I think this is a positive change.