JavaOne, Day 1: Sessions

Here’s a breakdown of some of the sessions that I attended on the first day of the JavaOne conference. I meant to get this out in a more timely manner but it turns out that I’m no good at spontaneous posting.

A conference like JavaOne has an overwhelming number of technical sessions, labs, panel discussions, and vendor booths. As a result, I often feel like I need to fight back the feeling of failure if I somehow don’t absorb it all.

To counter this anxiety I often remember the wise words of my good friend Linc (who is also the drummer of Hungry Fathers): “Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, try to be three things to seven people”.

So having said that, my “three things” generally are: Groovy, JavaFX, and Usability.

JVM Script Showdown (a.k.a. “Script Bowl”)

This session was intended to be a sort of “rapid fire” comparison of several JVM languages: Jython, Groovy, Clojure, Scala, and JRuby.

Of course the winner of the “showdown” really was predetermined by how much support for each language walked through the door (it was Groovy). In other words, it’s difficult to imagine any “blank slates” coming to the session and, after hearing 5 minutes about each language, forming a definite preference.

Although the sales pitch by the panelists did play a part, and to that point, Dick Wall (of Java Posse fame) deserves a special mention for his infectious love of Scala. He almost convinced me to step away from my predetermined vote for Groovy.

Almost.

Java Puzzlers

Listening to Neal Gafter and Josh Bloch is a good reminder that the most important part of a session is its speaker(s). This is evidenced by the fact that we were all riveted to what amounted to exploring corner cases of the java compiler. I think if Josh offered a session on what he had for lunch, I would still enthusiastically attend.

AJAX vs. JavaFX

Self-described as AJAX’s Hannity to JavaFX’s Colmes, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, both AJAX advocates, debated the merits of the two development platforms. Having thoroughly enjoyed Ben’s two sessions from last year’s JavaOne, I wasn’t surprised to see him excel in his element: defending the web platform.

While Dion very aptly defended JavaFX, it was odd that they weren’t able to wrangle up someone who actually believed in the merits of JavaFX over AJAX (doubly so given that this is a conference about JavaFX).

Some memorable fighting words from Ben (somewhat paraphrased):

• “JavaFX seems like it was one guy’s idea at designing a language with no thought to compatibility.” (i.e. its syntax is unnecessarily different from Java making it difficult for Java programmers to learn). (My parenthetical aside: This is the most common criticism I’ve heard voiced against JavaFX. As a Java programmer I agree that it would have been nice if JavaFX was simply a specialized DSL of Groovy (bonus parenthetical aside: more of this particular point in a future post), and therefore easy to get up to speed in. My only response in JavaFX’s favor is that the language is targeted toward ActionScript developers, not Java programmers. Remember that JavaFX was originally acquired by Sun as the language F3 so (I assume) it had no thought to Java compatibility as its birth. I don’t know if that’s a mark in JavaFX’s favor as much as it is explaining away the question).
• Java fonts exist in the “uncanny valley“, something is always just a bit “off” with them as compared to native fonts.

Toward a Renaissance VM

This was mostly an explanation of the new JVM byte code instruction “invokeDynamic” with enough background provided so that a non VM engineer such as myself could (mostly) follow along. Of particular interest was a concise explanation of where the line is between Java the language and Java the Platform.  Unfortunately this session suffered from “last of the day” syndrome, so the notes that I took are incomprehensible to me as I try to read over them two days later.

That does it for day one. Be sure to stay tuned for untimely session coverage of Day Two of the JavaOne 2009 conference…