JavaOne 2008

I've been at JavaOne all week, but not blogging. That is partially because of the horrible Wi-Fi at JavaOne this year. Luckily it is good today, so I am blogging before Josh Bloch's Effective Java talk. I also just picked up the new edition of Effective Java, as if I could somehow read the whole thing before the talk ... Probably should have waited to buy it at the end of the day since I won't be reading it until the train ride home. Anyways...

So what's been good at JavaOne this year? Well ... no big news, really. We see more meat on JavaFX and I guess that was the lead story at the opening keynote. It seems like JFX is about where Silverlight was a year ago. The JVM 6, update 10 does rock. You can do so much more with Java than with Flash or Silverlight, regardless of JFX, so it will be interesting to see if people leverage that.

Along those lines, the most interesting session I saw this week was by the guys from Ajaxian, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith. Their talk was titled "What's new in Ajax." The subject matter was interesting, but that's not what made their talk so awesome. They are outstanding speakers, and they seem to have a great rapport between them. Their talk seemed very conversational. It also definitely stood out for NOT having to follow the Sun presentation template. It was a Keynote presentation full of cool graphics, animations, and even some short video interviews with some of the top dogs in the world of Ajax frameworks. 

They also did two cool demos, one with Fluid. I fee like such a nov for not having seen this before. It is awesome. They also did an awesome demo where they "threw" a dart at a dart board. The dart board was an Ajax app running the in the browser. The dart was a Wiimote! They used the Bluetooth connection of the Wiimote to send to the PC, and then bridged the Bluetooth stack on the PC to the browser using (drum roll please) a Java applet. The applet was just for communicating with the OS, all of the graphics were in HTML and the interactivity was JavaScript. Very freakin' cool. 

The other good session I went to was Alex Miller's talk on design patterns. Most of this was stuff I was familiar with, like problems with the Singleton and Visitor patterns. What was interesting to me was that Alex showed how closures could dramatically change the implementation of some of these patterns. He showed this for a template pattern. Both template and strategy patterns are kind of obvious targets for refactoring with closures. What surprised me was how a visitor pattern could be refactored using closures. I was inspired to start playing with design patterns in Scala, since that is the future of Java (in my opinion.) I tweeted this to Alex, and he pointed me to some writings on that exact topic. I still plan on doing my own exposition, as I think it will be fun.