The final day of JavaOne kicked off with a keynote featuring Scott McNealy who looked at growth areas for software and compared .NET to Java. Technical sessions covered were Standardizing Content Management (JSR 170), New Concurrency Utilities, a session on JXTA and JCA, URL Tokenization, a Case Study on a high volume system, and Web Service Versioning and Deprecation.

Read JavaOne Day Four Coverage

It's good to see standards (Standardizing Content Management (JSR 170)) and I know the focus is Java but it seems to me that it would be better to look to protocols or Web Services to define these common standards not a language specfic API. Use of such thing would allow a wider range of re-use and better security against future technology changes. Then lets have good Java code examples on top the platform independence.

Nigel, your comment is interesting, but the JSR stands for Java Specification Request. What you are referring to would be in jurisdiction of W3C or Oasis or some other CMS related standards group.

Alex Krut
Implementing Business Process in Java
http://www.freeroller.net/page/alexkrut

Any news regarding Java and XQuery?

The last day brought what was one of the best conference sessions I went to. The guys from Belguim who did XP J2EE consultancy just rocked.

Working in the valley can sometimes be a little depressing with all the layoffs and cut backs so to see two people doing such cool stuff made me a little jealous.

The tools they listed every developer and project should have to hand to write good code. PMD, Junit, Cactus, Cruise Control....

Nice work guys.
David

I posted this on day 3 coverage, but since Craig's talk was on day 4, I reposted it here.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

It was a dark night in a city that keeps its secrets, where one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions...OK, OK enough of the Guy Noir quotes, but seriously, there was an air of mystery (or maybe just lack of *official* publicity) surrounding JDO at this year's JavaOne.

Sun only seems to be able to find JavaOne presentation opportunities for JDO late at night. Spec lead Craig Russel's JDO BOF on Tuesday night started at 10:30 PM and David Jordan's BOF began at 9:30 PM. Craig did manage to work plenty of JDO into a technical session entitled "Applying Open Source and Web Technologies Together: Struts and OJB". In fact, this presentation seemed to focus on JDO! It was a great presentation which even included a functioning web application for publishing RSS feeds using Struts and the Sun JDO RI.

David's BOF presented work he did to implement the Rice University Bidding System (RUBiS). Five different JDO vendors participated; four provided O/R mapping implementations and one provided an object database implementation.

Designed to benchmark various implementations of an online auction site, RUBiS has in the past been one of the few sources of quantitative comparisons between CMP, BMP, and straight JDBC architectures. So it was with baited breath that the audience anticipated David's results for JDO. After a code review of JDO, CMP and JDBC it was apparent that the JDO code was the most comprehensible, but the audience came to see bar charts and prompted David to push forward. The first quantitative slide showed a "lines of code" count for JDBC, CMP and JDO. No surprises there, JDO had the smallest amount of java source code.

As David was preparing to move on to the quantitative results, an AV guy from Key3 Media literally shut David Jordan down in mid sentence informing us that the time was up and turning off both projectors. The audience squawked about the iniquity to no avail, and finally trooped into the hallway where David was literally cornered, and availed himself of questions. The big question: was JDO faster?

It turns out that as with all benchmarks, the 5 JDO participants are squabbling over the results, though that's my interpretation, not what David said. According to David he has no results to present at this time, but in a few months the quantitative results will be available.

With that, the crew of JDO implementers and users made their way to the local pub. Over a few beers, conversation turned to the political questions of the day: Why are the big database vendors against JDO? Why was David Jordan's mike shut off during Oracle's presentation, effectively silencing his defense of JDO? Was "The Smoking Man" behind it all?

Answer: it doesn't matter. There seems to be a genuine groundswell of developer interest in JDO. In David's words, "Once you try JDO, you're hooked."

I believe Doug Lea's Concurrency Package is 100% pure java.

In the technical session on Doug Lea's util.concurrent and JSR-166, they mentioned that JSR-166 will include a JDK modification to use hardware-level locking mechanism for performance purposes. I believe the next version of util.concurrent will include this modification.

I didn't quite catch if it was a JDK modification or just a JNI call.

Here's a link to a test version of JSR166 changes, includes JDK modifications for Solaris, Linux and Windows:

http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/concurrency-interest/jsr166/

Not sure why he has to always make a point to compare java technology with .Net and always comment on .Net is lagging or not upto the mark etc etc.
    Its Java One - so just talk about how great java is, how it is grwoing into different areas, new issues etc. Its a pity that we have to compare ourselves to .Net all the time to make ourselves feel better. We are better in so many areas and we know we r heading in right direction, so why bother comment on MSFT. And its ok sometimes, but I have attended about 6 keynotes/ speeches / seminars of Scott McNealy in last 2 years and in every one of them he is blaming or cursing microsoft. This is a sign of a immature leader. You guys may think i m crazy. But its really a shame that we have to prove ourselves right by proving that .Net is wrong or slow or not scalabale etc etc etc. anyway .. I hope atleast one of you understand what I mean.

P.S. - I havent come across an interview / seminar / comment of Bill gates claiming java is worst or not easy or whatever .... He may have siad sometime in life , but its very un common of him. He will say only good things about MSFT technology ... sometimes even its not good :)

yeah, imho the "java vs. microsoft" report card was a total waste of time and pure propaganda on the part of Sun's marketing department. I really wish they'd cut it out, it's like bad paid-advertising political commercials.