The first keynote of this JavaOne Conference started with a short film called "Java on the March." It was pretty funny because it started like a newsreel. There was a short section of the film on Diawa, a trading firm in London - they are using Java to bridge front and back offices.
John Gage then walked out and told us that there were over 14,000 of us sitting in chairs and on the floor in the double-auditorium. There were over 275 exhibitors waiting to show us what they have. He talked a little about the Java Ring we all received. The experiment was to create a 14,000 node distributed system to calculate points in a fractal image. And, our business card would be loaded in the ring also. Pop it into the little interfaces (parallel or serial - I bought my serial interface today, April 2) and the system can recognize that a ring has been inserted and perform actions as programmed using Java. Very slick.... Then John introduced James Gosling, Vice President and Sun Fellow for JavaSoft.
James began by telling us that there were more internet developers using Java than C++, C and Visual Basic combined. He mentioned Project Java Activator, which will allow you to run a selected VM on a given machine at a given time.
JIT performance is beginning to approach C and C++ performance. The optimization strategy has been:
James Gosling then announced that on the day before (Monday, March 23), the third (hopefully final) beta of V. 1.2 of the JDK went public. Swing, the new Java Foundation Classes, went public February 25. The big feature mentioned for Swing was plugable look-and-feel.
At this point, there were a number of demos. First up was TogetherJ, a UML-based design and code editing tool (I've downloaded the Windows 95 version [it is 100% Pure Java, but due to slight differences in the VMs on the systems they tweek the code a little - they plan to stop doing this with the regular release of V. 1.2 of the JDK and Project Java Activator] - I'll let you all know what I think of TogetherJ soon - I was very impressed by the demo and the Friday session on design patterns held by Peter Coad). Next up was a portable with the WeatherLabs front end running - it was displaying current weather patterns in San Francisco and the nation. They used IDL on their middle-tier server, and the new Java 2D API allowed them to easily do transparent areas and anti-aliasing. There was a short demo of Java Spaces, a layer on top of RMI that provides more powerful distribution mechanisms; they called it a "network backplane." Last up was a new oscillascope from Tektronix which runs Java - you can download new servlets to the box to reprogram it.
This completed James's talk. John Gage came out to introduce Dr. Alan Baratz, President of JavaSoft. Dr. Baratz made a number of announcements, including:
Compatibility, Stability, and PerformanceAt that point, things came to a close and we pushed and shoved our way to the first sessions.