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Java Day 2006 in Paris

Well, in fact Java Day 2006 wasn’t held in Paris itself but in Versailles, just in front of the castle So, yes, things also happen outside the US. I know, it was just a one day java conferences with only 5 sessions, nothing compare to the four days of Java One and its 188 sessions. But still, we had James Goslings on stage. If you look at the agenda, this is what happened.

Welcome
Eric Mahé ? Technology Advisor ? Sun Microsystems France

Eric, who has been working for 17 years at Sun, introduced the java day and the agenda. After few marketing slides (you always have to thank the sponsors) he joked about Extreme Pixel Programming. The idea is that Eric is not a java programmer, the tool he uses the most is Photoshop and he would like to use it to code some java classes. So he opened Photoshop, dragged & dropped some images, saved it as a raw file, opened the raw file, copied the content and pasted it into a java file in Netbeans. He then executed it, and the image was displayed with animation. He said that the one who finds the trick will win one of its own art work… bets opened.

The Next Wave of Java Tools
James Gosling ? Chief Technology Officer of Sun’s Developer Products group

James arrived on stage and threw some left over t-shirt of Java One at the crowd… I didn’t get one. He spoke only in English even if he mentioned that he studied French for 9 years at school.

He first said, Java is everywhere (enterprise, pc, card…) and that the most astonishing application he has seen was Brazilian health care system developed in Java/J2EE and used by millions of people. He then moved on quickly on enumerated Java 5 and Java 6 features (like the compiler API) and then tools. To decrease development complexity Java needs tools: java studio creator, studio enterprise and NetBeans.

On the UI side he mentioned Ajax of course but said that Swing is catching up. He did a demo of the software his brother company uses. DIRTT is a company that builds offices: walls, doors, furniture… and the software they use (written in Java of course) is pretty amazing. You can draw a map of you office, drag and drop doors, walls and it displayed in 3D with a fantastic precision (embedded expert system). It can at the same time interrogates the manufacturer and order these doors. Nice way to advertise your brother’s company James.

After that he talked a little bit about real time in Java and java performance: Java Beat or equals C/C++ (-2% Linpack, +4% Scimark) and is near Fortran.

He finished with this slide « What comes next? » at which he replied: I don’t know but the community will make it happen.

The Java Community Process
Max Lanfranconi – Java Community Process Program Ambassador

5 minutes introduction to the afternoon session on JCP Program

Java? EE 5 Platform: Even Easier With Tools
Ludovic Champenois – Sun Microsystems Corp
Emmanuel Bernard – Lead Developer EJB3 EG member

The outline was about J2EE 5, Glassfish, performance and Netbeans. As we know now, J2EE 5 has been announced and there is already two implementation: one by TmaxSoft (Jeus) and one by Sun. Ludovic went then through a couple of slides showing EJB and Web Services code in J2EE 1.4 and J2EE 5 and, of course, told us that J2EE 5 makes it easier to develop. « Thanks to annotations that are better than xDoclet ». When he said that, he had to go through explaining why. The reason is that xDoclet is used to produce java code or xml files and annotations are embedded in the compiled class. He went quickly throu an example with JPA which is implemented by 3 open source project: Glassfish/Toplink, JBoss/Hibernate, BEA/Kodo. And ended with quick slides of JAX-WS (successor of JAX-RPC) and JAXB 2.0.

Emmanuel then gave a demo of Hibernate Entity Manager (which implements JPA) and Hibernate Validator (a nice way to externalise your business rules and validates your POJOs). He did this demo with NetBeans and JBoss.

What’s new with Desktop Java in Mustang?
Romain Guy – Sun Microsystems Corp

I’m not a UI guy but I have to say that it was pretty impressive. Romain started asking « how many people think Swing is slow and ugly? ». I was going to raise my hand but he then moved on giving a quick demo of an application that stores photos (AerithWith GoogleMap you can display a map with the route of your holidays and drag&drop photos on the map. You can then publish it on a web page or watch it as a video. The GUI interface made with Swing was really amazing with a lot of visual effects. He also mentioned JOGL

Xwiki, Hibernate, Groovy, … The French Java OpenSource Vitality
Didier Girard, Vincent Massol, Guillaume Laforge ? OSSGTP

Didier Girard the creator of the Application-Servers.com introduced the OpenSource Get Together Paris. This informal group created 2 years ago gathers active Parisian member of the Java OS community. He then introduced and asked questions to the following people:

Round Table
Moderator : Philippe Davy/Journalist. J. Gosling/Sun, V. Massol/OSSGTP, T. Grall/Oracle, Hervé Crespel/Club Java, Jean-Pierre Blanger/Ricoh

The topic of the round table was simplicity. From simplifying the JCP process James Gosling also talked about the Java language. The language itself is pretty simple, the problems are the APIs. That’s also why Sun wants to keep the JDK simple and not bundle every great idea into it. Again he talked about tools that are needed to simplify. He gave the example of Applets. Java was created on Applets and lost the market. He doesn’t want to see Swing loose the UI market again because it’s too complex to develop an application with (he mentioned Flex).

Five Reasons Why You Should become a Java Community Process Member
Liz M Kiener – Java Community Process Program Manager

After the round table people had a break to cheer up, relax and talk to other people. I couldn’t. I enrolled to the JCP session which was initialy a one and half day course compacted into half a day. So we didn’t have time to chill out.

I went to this session because more that once in my Java life I thought «I would like to contribute to the JCP and become a member». But each time I go to the JCP website I think, oh my god, that’s too difficult to understand. That’s why I went to this session… to understand. Well, after 4 hours, it was as clear as a rock. There are so many acronyms (JCP, JSR, RI, TCK, PMO, SLG, EC, FCS, TCD…), so many stages a JSR has to go throu (JSR Approval Ballot, Community Review, Early Draft, Public Review, Proposed Final Draft, Final Approval Ballot and Final Release) and so many details (a ballot cannot happen 8 days before the proposal has been sent and 30 days after the review (or something like that))… I think it’s not this time that I will become a member.

There are 1204 entities and 3436 active persons involved in JSRs. North America is first and Europe second. France itself has 48 entities and 125 active people.

They’ve promised to put the slides on their website. I might understand better next time.

Round Table – JavaOne 2006: Ask The Experts
J. Gosling/Sun, A. Moussine-Pouchkine/Sun, T. Régnier/Club Java, Guillaume Laforge/Project Groovy, Tugdual Grall/Oracle, Moderator Eric Mahé/Sun

Thibaut Regnier gave a quick presentation about what he saw in Java One 2006 and so did the other people on stage. Java One 2006 was by far the best Java One ever (everybody agreed on that). There were 14000 people who had 188 sessions to choose from 8:30am to 11:20pm. Lucky you. I wish I was there. He said that one of the big successful session was the French Government tax one. I learnt that when I pay my taxes online I use Spring and Hibernate… pretty impressive when you know that the website stays open for less than a month and millions of people pay online. Oh, he also said that Borland is slowly desepearing from the Java One scene.

Then the crowd asked few questions. Because it’s not very often that we have James Gosling on stage I asked him if he new what the future of Java will be. He answered that he had his personal list of features that he would like to see in the language but not everybody agreed on. He said that his dream is too kill Fortran and for that calculation in Java have to be more efficient. He told us the story of the sin/cosine bug in Intel. Intel, since the 8086 processor carries a bug that makes the result of sin/cosine false. Java has to do a bit of work behind the scene but still doesn’t make it completely right.

That’s all. Thanks James, thanks everybody for this glimpse of Java One… maybe next year I’ll go to the US for the big show. I’ve got a friend who can offer me a bed.

If anybody went to the Java Day and wants to add more information, feel free to leave some comments.

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