:jasonrudolph => :blog

Well folks, the tenth and final installment is upon us. Just three more sessions make up our home stretch…

The Scala Experience — Safe Programming Can Be Fun!

Presented by Martin Odersky (Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL)

The Java Posse has been chatting up Scala for some time now, so what better way to see what all the fuss is about than to get the scoop on Scala straight from its designer?

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The fourth and final day of JavaOne: it was a big one. Here we go…

Comparing the Developer Experience of Java EE 5.0, Ruby on Rails, and Grails: Lessons Learned from Developing One Application

Presented by Tom Daly (Senior Performance Engineer at Sun Microsystems) and Damien Cooke (ISV Engineering at Sun Microsystems)

Having spent many years now developing applications in the JEE space, and having had a good look at Rails before spending the past year working with Grails, I was eager to see whether others have drawn the same conclusions as I have. It’s a time-tested technique to loosen up the crowd with a joke, and when I heard Tom’s opening line - “I don’t know much about Ruby and I don’t know much about Groovy” - I was a bit concerned. It wasn’t meant to be a joke. Yet somehow, in just 60 minutes, they actually managed to pull off a pretty darn fair comparison of the three frameworks.

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Groovy’s getting a whole lotta love at the JavaOne bookstore this week, and as of this moment, Groovy in Action is #5 on the JavaOne best seller list. Groovy’s been at least mentioned in almost every session I’ve seen, and as you can tell from the titles of the talks below, these particular sessions gave it much more than just a passing comment.

Advanced Groovy

Presented by Rod Cope (CTO and Founder of OpenLogic)

Two-time JavaOne rockstar Rod Cope pulled out all the stops in this talk, and given the wow-factor of this session, I’ll be quite surprised if he doesn’t three-peat his rockstar status.

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The variety of topics at this year’s JavaOne has been quite impressive, and Day 3 was no exception. Ruby, JavaScript, Groovy, Spring, and JMX all in one day? You bet. Here goes.

JRuby on Rails: Agility for the Enterprise

Presented by Thomas Enebo and Charles Oliver Nutter (JRuby Core Developers)

Charlie and Tom referred to this session as a chance to see “how the other 8% lives,” and not surprisingly, this talk saw a fair amount of traffic. When they polled the audience though, it was quite interesting to see that more folks had heard of Rails than had heard of Ruby. (I imagine the Ruby veterans find that bit of trivia to be a bit annoying.)

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Day 2 wrapped up with talks on ways to stay sane when developing in two particular problem domains: concurrency and web apps. And since those domains certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, this pair of sessions made for a good closing to a solid day of Java geekery.

Effective Concurrency for the Java Platform

Presented by Brian Goetz (Author of Java Concurrency in Practice)

Much like Josh Bloch and Bill Pugh did on Day 1, Brian Goetz demonstrated his uncanny knack for taking a complex problem space and presenting it in a manner that’s both easily digestible and fun to learn.

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For Day 2’s early afternoon sessions, I had the opportunity to see two very different solutions for building rich user interfaces.

Fast, Beautiful, Easy: Pick Three–Building Web User Interfaces in the Java Programming Language with Google Web Toolkit

Presented by Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber (Creators of GWT)

GWT was clearly one of the biggest headline grabbers coming out of JavaOne ‘06, and the Google guys were back and ready to convince any of the wait-and-seers that haven’t yet taken it for a spin.

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Day 2 was a marathon for sure, but it was well worth it. Time for the morning report…

Creating Amazing Web Interfaces with Ajax

Presented by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (Co-authors of Pragmatic Ajax and Founders of Ajaxian.com)

It’s been two years now since I first saw Ben Galbraith’s and Stu Halloway’s rockstar presentation on Ajax at NFJS, and I was pleased to see another great talk today showing just how very far things have progressed in that time. The plumbing continues to fade into the background, allowing devs to focus more and more on the problem domain and less on the details of HTTP status codes, etc.

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A very full first day is in the books. Here we go…

Sun Keynote

The conference officially kicked off with the 2-hour “Sun General Session.”

• F3 gets rebranded as JavaFX, but will people in the Silverlight and Flex camps even give it a thought?
• JRuby’s getting a whole lotta love from Sun. They specifically called out JRuby in at least two instances (including official support for it in Glassfish V2).

On to the tech sessions…

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So here’s the scene…

• Setting: Moscone Center, Main Hall
• Audience: ~15,000
• Speaker wardrobe: Blue jeans and black shirt
• Hardware on stage: Macs
• Time: Tuesday morning
• Product being demoed: New handheld tech gadget

Sounds like a recipe for success, right? Sadly, no. All that came to mind is this simple equation:

JavaFX Mobile = iPhone - cool

And for some reason, the phone they had on stage looked 10 times uglier than the one in their promo pic. (Where’s the marketing department when you need them?) Of course, the stuttering UI didn’t do much for its appeal either. And is it just me, or did they forget to turn off the spellchecker before they took their screenshot?

=

The No Fluff Just Stuff G2One event officially kicked off my JavaOne festivities last night, and it turned out to be the veritable who’s who of Java geekery. I say that affectionately, of course, and I was quite impressed. It’s a clear testament to the sincere interest the Java community has in the Groovy story. Faces I saw in the crowd (some of which I had the distinct pleasure to meet) included none other than: Dick Wall and Carl Quinn (of Java Posse fame), Emmanuel Bernard (of Hibernate and JBoss fame), Romain Guy (of Filthy Rich Client fame and owner of the French accent making occasional, and always hilarious, guest appearances on the afore-mentioned Java Posse), Stu Halloway (most-recently of Ruby and Rails fame), David Geary (of Swing and JSF fame), and Chris Richardson (of POJOs in Action fame). And when we capped off the event with the panel discussion, we were presented with a surprise guest host, Ted Neward (of interoperability/controversy fame (wink)), to preside over the session. Very cool! It was a blast!

For those that weren’t able to attend the event (or are perhaps still wanting more Groovy/Grails goodness), Jay Zimmerman announced plans for a dedicated Groovy and Grails training program that’s set to debut in September and then the first Groovy Experience conference scheduled for February of next year. Stay tuned. The momentum continues to build.

As a final note, it was great to finally meet so many of the Groovy and Grails pioneers and evangalists in person: Graeme Rocher (who has a good write-up on Day 0 as well), Dierk Koenig, Guillaume LaForge, Andrew Glover, and Neal Ford. Keep groovin’, Guys!