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Day 1 coverage of JavaOne 2004 gives you a glimpse into the morning keynote by Jonathan Schwartz in which several announcements were made: the open sourcing of Project Looking Glass and a new SOA endeavor - Project Kitty Hawk. The article also delves into a few of the key topics covered at the conference such as JavaServer Faces, and looks at an important panel discussion on the 'Business Side of J2EE Compatibility'. Coverage of the Monday night blogger gathering at the Thirsty Bear has also been provided.

Schwartz Keynote: Booming Java Economy, 'The Newtwork is the Computer', Project Looking Glass

The school of Java opened Monday morning at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. The newly promoted Principal Jonathan Schwartz presided over the lesson. "Class! I am proud to report that Java as a platform is doing well; scoring good grades; and more popular than ever!" Schwartz reported 350 million Java mobile telephones enable a $3 Billion Java mobile game market. Schwartz reported there are 600 million Java card hall passes. Plus, 650 million personal computers have shipped with Java installed. And, the Java.com Web site handles 40,000 downloads of the Java Developer Kit each week. Looking gleeful Schwartz announced, "Ubiquity brings Opportunity!" But, later in the morning Schwartz warned the class, "When you lack compatibility, you do not have ubiquity; You have popularity, which is not the same thing."

Principal Schwartz reports that Sun has caught the service bug. Sun is attracted to a fiscal structure where service revenue from customers, developers, and partners drags along hardware and software products. Sun praised the model of ring-tones on a mobile phone. Customized ring melodies increase the aftermarket revenue per customer for a mobile phone company. Applied to a software developer, the service model has Sun selling a $99 per year service agreement for the Sun Developer Network. The subscription gives Java developers access to networks, forums, chat rooms, development tools software, and an AMD Opteron workstation comes along for free.

If you think this sounds a little bonkers, consider that Schwartz told a story of a recent trip to the On Star group at General Motors where the idea of downloadable car horn tones came up in conversation. Schwartz asked how much monthly revenue would have to come to On Star before General Motors would give a customer the car for free? To Sun's surprise GM has an answer. If consumers were willing to pay $220/month for On Star the car would come for free.

Schwartz gave a reprise to last year's announcement of project Rave, a Java development tool at the intersection of Struts and Java Server Faces. Schwartz reports that the newly named Sun Java Studio Creator is now final and available for immediate download from Sun's Web site. In a bid to bring some audience excitement back to Creator, Sun invited audience members to vote for a "pretty retail box" for Creator. The audience chose a picture of a Tiger. The Creator user interface is much improved over last year's preview - nice colors and an easier flow. Pricing and distribution licenses were not clear but Sun intends to get Creator's trial edition into many Java developer's hands.

Creator is built on top of NetBeans. It provides a smart design to visually create new Web-applications and to enable business workflows that use database connections, and external services. Creator's relevance one year later is tempered a little by recent events. BEA WebLogic Workshop provides a Struts and Java Server Faces development tool for building Web applications and Web Services. BEA announced it will soon distribute Workshop under an Apache-style open-source license. Additionally, the Eclipse integrated development tool is finding improvements that put it on par with Creator for Struts and Java Server Faces. While Sun thinks Creator is the only kid in the sandbox, it may be missing the others.

Schwartz gave the audience a fresh look at Project Looking Glass, a Java-based next generation desktop metaphor. Rather than having two-dimensional windows that tile over each other when dragged, Looking Glass can rotate in three dimensions the windows that appear on the desktop. Schwartz announced that the Java 3D library will now be distributed under an open-source license. Schwartz also acknowledged that Looking Glass too may be licensed under an open-source license.

Later in the day, Sun made announcements and showed attendees product demonstration of its next-generation Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) toolset and practice codenamed Kittyhawk. Over the past three years Sun put significant resources into emerging standards around Web Services, Enterprise Beans, Containers, Connectors, XML messaging, business process integration (BPI,) and Web-enabled application development. Sun is betting that in the near future these technologies will reach a point of confluence. Sun plans for Kittyhawk to provide Java developers and enterprise customers with SOA development tools, implementation frameworks, and expert consultants. In the upcoming days of JavaOne Sun plans several events, including an SOA customer panel, an SOA vendor session, and demonstrations of a new development tool for building Service Oriented Development of Applications (SODA.) But that will have to wait until the morning when class resumes.

But before we drift off to sleep, Schwartz left us with a new gift. http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan is the home to Schwartz's new blog.

Blogger Meetup

I strolled over to the Thirsty Bear at 6:30 for the blogger meetup. Hani and Cedric were chatting over a beer, and in short order a flow of people came in. Simon Phipps had reserved a spot for the gathering, and it was pretty obvious that we would out grow it.

This is what JavaOne is about for me. Meeting smart technologists, and friends. Cedric was even brave enough to invite his girl friend! I can only imagine what she was thinking as Gavin King and Hani Sulieman argued about JBoss dropping the "P" from AOP. It is amazing the fluff that techies argue about, and Hani did try not to call Gavin, "Gavin Fleury". Apparently, the night before at an O'Reilly get together, Marc Fleury got all riled up over Bruce Snyder (Castor/Geronimo) discussing JDO with Gavin. He wanted to swing for him, and a couple of people had to drag him off. This is only technology guys!

Jonathan Schwartz started a blog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/) and he joined everyone, which was very cool of him. It will definitely be an interesting read.

The Thirsty Bear obviously doesn't want to make money, as the bar closed at 10:45. This meant that people had to move down to O'Briens, and the night kept going, and going, and going.

Everyone was jealous of the Atlassian guys as they talked about the cool stuff at Apples WWDC. They didn't have a Tiger though ;)

The Business Side of of J2EE Compatibility

In this panel, representatives from key J2EE platform licensees such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Sun, and JBoss, discussed the importance of J2EE compatibility (including backward compatibility), the commoditization of application servers, and managed to squeeze in a few plugs for their products and services.

Collectively, J2EE compatible licensees invest millions of dollars to become J2EE compatible, which means that they have passed the J2EE Compatibility Test Suite (CTS). The market reality is that J2EE compatibility has become a requirement. Customers won't even consider your product if you're not compatible.

There were concerns expressed from the audience regarding the possibility of future J2EE specs not being backward compatible. A company representative said they had spent millions migrating to the J2EE 1.0 spec and even more moving to 1.3. He asked the panel what app server will allow his company to not have to spend any more money. Marc Fleury, representing JBoss on the panel, jokingly raised his hand.

Karen Tegan from Sun, assured the audience that Sun is enforcing backward compability and also have a backward compatibility test suite. The Application Verification Kit (AVK), is another measure to help realize the promise of 'write once, run anywhere'.

The panelists agreed that the application server is becoming more of a commodity. Although compatibility is important, J2EE application servers are differentiated through factors like performance, additional offerings, and support.

Most panelists also agreed that what excited them most about the J2EE platform was the incorporation of Web services into J2EE 1.4 and also the new EJB, JSP, Servlet and JMS specs. But the agreeing stopped there. Each in turn went on a brief soapbox on why their application server is the best choice. Underlying the marketing pitches however, was a comforting vision of diversity in the J2EE market, which ultimately means greater choice for companies.

Fleury painted a nice picture reminding us of the infancy of the J2EE spec. "We're in the dark ages of middleware (only 5 years into the J2EE). We need to balance standardization with innovation." The J2EE platform is growing with changing, real world, business requirement, but at the same time cannot lose sight of its original promises of compatibility, portability and easy adoption.

JavaServer Faces

The open sourced release of JavaServer Faces is definitely one of the big new things coming out of JavaOne this year. JavaServer Faces promises to be a quantum leap in how we develop web applications, catapulting us into the age of assembling pages based on next generation web components. The JavaServer Faces fiesta kicked off when Sun President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz announced that the JSF reference implementation would be made available to the entire open source community via java.net.

During the technical sessions, the advance towards JavaServer Faces was given more technical and historic detail than during JSF spec lead and Struts project lead developer Craig McClanahan's excellent session on the "Web Tier State of the Union".

In the following technical session, Sun demonstrated this year's JavaOne focus on the "real world" with "Building Real-World-Ready UI Components for the Web Using JavaServer Faces Technology". This session began with a review of the technical aspects of JSF and then was followed up with 2 excellent demonstrations of the power behind JSF web components in real world projects. Developers could see first hand how prebuilt chart components and geographical mapping JSF components could be smoothly woven into an HTML page inside of Sun's new Creator tool which enables html designers to easily weave prebuilt JSF components into their HTML pages without having to understand Java. Make no mistake about it, JSF is going to blow ASP.NET's component architecture away.

Then, in the evening Birds-of-a-feather sessions, developers had a chance to meet the spec leads for JSF first hand. The BOF began with a short 15 minute review of the major features included in the JSF component framework, which include but aren't limited to:

• Ability to include prebuilt UI components in an HTML page
• APIs for extending or creating new UI components
• Pluggable validators and converters
• Pluggable navigation (page flow)
• Event handlers
• Pluggable renderers

Developers then had a chance to ask their toughest questions about JSF. Some of the topics included:

• JSF and Struts- Craig reassured the audience that while JSF represents a major advancement in web development, Struts most certainly wasn't going away nor is it being left in the dust. In fact, Craig noted that he is currently working on a Struts-JSF integration library that will allow Struts applications to coexist on the same page as JSF components. In this way, companies with existing investments in Struts won't have to give anything up in order to make use of the new capabilities made available by JSF.
• JSF and Tiles- Currently JSF doesn't include a substitute for Strut's tiles, although there is some discussion about standarding a tiles like taglib in future releases of the JSTL.
• JSF and Portlets- JSF and portlets are basically complementary... portlets allow you to dynamically assemble custom portal pages using portlets, while the portlets themselves may internally include JSF components.
• JSF and Tapestry- The spec leads expressed preliminary interest in exploring the possibility of including a tapestry like XML rendering framework similar to tapestry in JSF 2.0.

Following the BOF session, the spec leads stayed around for an additional 45 minutes talking with the audience and answering even more questions. It was very encouraging to see how in tune with the community and the communities needs the JSF spec team really was. The JSF group is a model for how the JCP can really produce quality results based on community input and learning from existing innovation (including Struts, Tapestry, Tiles, SiteMesh, etc).

Key News from Day 1

"The client is back", according to Jonathan Schwartz. Project Looking Glass is a desktop window manager which works with a 3D world. The creator of the technology officially open sourced the Java 3D technology, and promised that Looking Glass itself would be opened as soon as it is ready.

Sun has announced a new SOA effort named Project Kitty Hawk. It was breezed over quickly in the keynote, so some are confused as to what the new project actually entails. To begin with, Sun has a new SOA Readiness Assessment as part of professional services. In the future the Java Enterprise System will aim to simplify management, security, and provisioning of services in an SOA.

There were cheers in the audience when Sun announced that Creator was now generally available, and that it was "FREE". However, the details seem to be that you can download it for free, and use it for an extended time, however it still seems to really be $99 (or $49 if you get it at the conference).

Sun has created a new Java.net open source project for the development of the reference implementation of JavaServer Faces. Ed Burns said the project aims to be the most complete implementation of the spec, have a fast turn-around time, build a community of developers, and to demonstrate uncompromising commitment to test-first development and code review for all code coming into the project.

Looking Ahead

Day 2 coverage of JavaOne examines all the buzz around Service Oriented Architecture at this year's JavaOne. Is it a buzzword or a new reality for enterprise computing? A customer panel on SOA addressed some of the issues. EJB 3.0 was another area of focus on Day 2 with Linda DeMichiel's technical session which previewed the new, simplified programming model. In the evening, people gathered at Zebulon for a party hosted by Tangosol and SolarMetric to discuss the days events, catch up with friends, and have a few beers.

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