Java One 2008: “Java + You”

You might have already known this, Java is omni-present in an average person’s life, from desktop, web, mobile devices, to a simple pen. This trend seems to be accelerating due to the rise of Web 2.0, and people’s appetite to be connected to each other 24/7. The web is moving closer and closer into our lives, and Java is the technology that enables this. Innovation becomes easy when using Java, because developers only have to write code once, and this code will run on any of the existing platforms supported by Java, no extra effort required. The same code can be run on Windows, Linux, web browser, or a mobile phone. There are also tons of Java libraries and frameworks out there, most of them free of charge and open source.

The key theme of this year’s Java One is "Java + You", and by "you", it represents how Java affects your daily life. Let’s see some key examples below:

JavaFX and JavaFX on Mobile

Sun’s new highly productive, statically typed scripting language for rich multi-media content. The JavaFX demo showed at Java One involves a Facebook photo-sharing application written in JavaFX script language, and the app runs on both desktop and mobile device. Need to mention that the demo application did crash twice in front of thousands of Java One attendees, and they have to quickly switch the big screens away from the demo to something else, otherwise, it did look pretty good. There are also a lot of technical sessions related to JavaFX technology, and they all drew high attendances and interests. It will be interesting to see how JavaFX will compete against Adobe Flex and the likes in the future. If I am a betting man, however, I wouldn’t put my money on JavaFX.

Amazon Kindle

Amazon demoed its popular Kindle reader at Java One. Did you know that Kindle has Java embedded in it? Me neither. It was a short demo, but at least its high-profile.

Java and Blu-ray

Neil Young likes Java. His is going to release all the music from his entire career on Blu-ray discs, and with the help of Blu-ray Java technology, user can easily browse through the contents on each disc.

Livescribe Smart Pen

It’s a pen. It’s a computer. It’s a Livescribe Smart Pen. This pen allows you to write some words on a piece of paper, and it will record the voice associated with these words, so later when you look back at your notes, you can just tap the pen on the words you wrote, and the pen will playback the voice recording from that moment. This is perfect for college students taking notes at lectures, the students can use the pen to playback parts of the lecture that correspond to the notes taken.

Real-time Java

One drawback in the past for Java is the unpredictability of its execution time; you cannot say for sure that when a trigger event happened, your program is able to generate a response within 5 milliseconds, for example. This is due the design of garbage-collection in Java, since garbage-collection can run at anytime and take any length of time, thus the unpredictability. With real-time Java, however, this problem is solved and as a result Java can be used in things such as robotics, mission control, etc.

CERN

Quantum physics, relativity, Big Bang. That’s right, Java can be a part of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)’s daily operation too. Java is used everywhere in CERN, including business process in various departments within CERN, and also analysis of petabytes of data from particle collisions conducted by the research team at CERN.

There are many other things happening at Java One, and there is no way to mention all of them here. Topics such as REST, Ruby, SOA, Web 2.0, and Spring are all very popular. If you are interested to find out more about Java One visit the links below, there are many webcasts and session material posted online.

Links

http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/index.jsp
http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp
Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device
http://www.livescribe.com
http://www.cern.ch

Mobility Tip: Listen to NBA Games On the Road

Don’t want to miss an NBA game on the road? No problem.

You can sign up for a free account with NBA.com’s All Access account which will give you the NBA Audio League Pass. With it, you can listen to all the current playoff games left.

Just in time for the playoffs. I recently switched programming on my Dish Network and lost TNT (trying to save a few bucks. I didn’t know that was going to happen). So I had to revert to listen to the games on an old Sony Walkman. And in certain parts of my house, the AM reception was just awful so I decided to sign up for an account with NBA.com thinking that I’d have to pay.



To my surprise, I didn’t! Woohoo! All you have to do is sign up for an account. It said it’s free for the 2007-08 season. No word for the 2008-09 season though.

And after the game, if you want to check out the highlights, they’ve got that too, http://www.nba.com/video. To my knowledge, there isn’t a way to watch it online for free.

Having said that, if you have AT&T DSL in your hotel or wherever you’re staying at has AT&T as the broadband provider, you can access ESPN 360 to watch a lot of sports games. So far I’ve managed to watch a few of the NBA games since I lost TNT.

I’m also interested in NHL and MLB games so if anyone else has tips for that on the road, let me know.