Category: Archive

Adobe had a large booth at JavaOne. They were running multiple presentations of their latest software. Since I’m into Flex now, I knew the latest news in this area, but I did not know all the news.

First, I’ve attended the demo of Adobe Acrobat. As many others, I knew that it’s a great tool for dealing with PDF files. To my surprise, the presenter showed us a quick demo of a PDF file that was getting its data directly from a Web service. Really nice!

When I met with Christophe Coenraetes, Adobe’s senior technical evangelist, he confirmed that this is a step toward the upcoming Adobe universal client. At this point, I’m not exactly sure how this is going to work, but the users will be able to run an independent ( non-browser based) Adobe Acrobat Reader integrated with the Flash player and HTML. This is a part of Adobe Apollo project, which should also include a mobile Flash Lite client.

Then we started talking about Flex 2 and its impact on the world of the rich internet applications. We’ve been writing on the subject before and I do not want to repeat myself, but I like the fact that the users will be able to run their fancy clients in the VM (a.k.a. Flash Player 9) that has a small footprint (under 1MB), easily integrates with Java and is available literally on every platform. Prior to our meeting with Christophe, I’ve been dreaming about free Flex Builder tool and have told him that this would be a really nice way to attract Java developers… Christophe has responded with his famous Mona Lisa smile. OK,OK, at least set the lowest possible price.

Flex 2 will be officially released in a month or so, and I’m looking forward to it. It seems that the marriage of Adobe and Macromedia was made in heaven.

There are not too many vendors that offer a really fast solution when it comes to working with super fast distributed cahing. As a consultant working on financial trading applications I always keep an eye on such tools.

At JavaOne I had a chance to meet with Cameron Purdy, from Tangosol. I was really impressed by their approach to improving the speed and reliability of in-memory data. They drastically minimize the number of time the data has to be access to guarantee availability of the same piece of data in all nodes of the cluster/data grid. Cameron explained me some technical details of how they move the processing closer to the data: you may either use a traditional approach when your application gets/puts the data from/to distributed cache, or instead of moving data over the wire, you can send the application itself to the data node.

Their Coherence product definitely worth considering if speed and high availability are the main requirements of your application.

I picked up their brochure…If I could give them one advice, it would be “Re-write your brochure “. It contains a set of standard promises to improve everything, but I’d make it more technical. Not everyone has a chance to meet with them in person to realize that their product may actually deliver the promise. Tangosol need more technical publications about thier products like this one.

Now they are partners with DataSynapse, a well known company in the data grid computing space. This partnership may bring a very fast and potent solution to the world of distributing computing.

P.S. After this blog was published, Cameron sent me the link to technical publications about their product.

This company offers an interesting alternative to full fledged Enterprise Content Management systems. To put it simple, they allow multiple users located literally anywhere in the world work on the same document. Xythos is a Web application that can be deployed on any J2EE server. They do not need to know what kind of documents you store (MS Word, .ppt, .xyz, .whatever), they just provide a way to organize, locate, retrieve, lock, check-in/check out the documents stored in any devices you like. Your database (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, PostgreSQL) stores the metadata about your documents and you arrange the documents in the file directories of your choice. Versioning of the documents is also supported.

You can use Xythos in three modes:

a) access through a standard Web interface,

b) by means of Microsoft “s Webfolders

c) by Xythos windows file system driver, which allows you to work with the documents offline.

The company also provides a Java API, so you can integrate it in your existing Java applications and develop your own GUI interface if needed. The company is in business since 1999 and has 2.5 million users.

Disclaimer: All this info was provided by the vendor.

I’ve attended an interesting panel including representatives of different technologies and frameworks (AJAX, Flex, DOJO, DWR, JSF, JAVA/JWS). These are some of sparced raw notes.I decided not to put names here, because the notes are not complete.

People like desktop because they need performance and ability to work in a disconnected mode. Also, people like the Web deployment model. Flex fits all of these requirements.

Can we take Java as a serious programming language? It’s very easy to make mistake in JavaScript. You can’t understand JavaScript until you run it. Do not expect it to be Java. If you love classes, run away from JavaScript.

Flex’s implements ECMAScript4, which supports strong typing, and if you know what are you dealing with you can achieve good performance.

Closures are very good features, and Java does not have them. JavaScript is not a good general programming language.

JSF creates and renders JavaScript for you. JSF encapsulate all different artifacts.

If you are in financial services, polling or HTTPConnections may not be a good idea. You can use either sockets or message service.

If you try to keep HTTP connection open, you have only two connections in IE. It’s not enough.

How do you decide if you do polling or you keep connection open.

Consumer/producers give you a flexible programming model . Your application is isolated from the polling or socket technology.

DOJO has poor documentation. Why bother, just right click and View Source :).

How many people are exited about using Flash. Only a handful of people raised their hands. Maybe because it’s proprietary and also it’s a plugin.

Five years ago, the programming model has involved timelines, people did not really understand how to use it.

Flex is free, the source code is published. Adobe wants to keep control over Flash player, which is a VM. Flash is a plugin, but it does not make it a second class citizen.

Creator of the DWR framework said that is not finished yet, and it relies on his time availability to finish it?!? I (YF) would not take such product seriously.

Swing is difficult to use. Answer: An API doubles the IQ test. :)) Flexibility comes with a price. Sun is trying to address it, for example they work on data binding. Does it means that in about 2-3 years it’ll be easier? :)))

Why have not applets gain traction? They are restricted to a rectangular box, and it takes a long time to start them.

Can you comment on Google’s W2T kit that lets you write Java that executes JavaScript? The solution is incomplete at this point.

Any thoughts on Backbase?

Hi AJAX and Java guys are planning to address complex GUI layouts? Java has GridbagLayout, but people need something easier. GroupLayout should help (Matisse, Netbeans). The good GUI builder in Java is about 10 years over due. In AJAX and browsers it’s not pretty, but you can do it. JSF has a concept of the component children, which helps with layouts.

The latest versions of Flash are not available on all platforms. Yes, Windows and Mac are the prime targets, and Linux will come next.

Flex has a component-based development env: Flex Builder, an Eclipse plugin with debugger and rich library

of components. You do not have to have a Flex server, you can talk directly to your Java components or Web services.

Flex 2 is a good technology for development of rich Internet applications, and Adobe is already making some serious changes in the pricing policy to bring Flex 2 to masses. But to make it attractive to five million of professional Java developers they should offer Eclipse-based Flex Builder IDE for free. Java developers enjoy a variety of excellent free Java IDE such as Eclipse, NetBeans and JDeveloper. Expensive IDEs like JBuilder or RAD are only used by some filthy rich corporations . An excellent IntellijIDEA IDE is not expensive, but it has very modest market share: Java developers are spoiled by good open source products.

Each time I talk to Java developers about Flex 2, the first question they ask, “Is it free? rdquo; I answer that even without IDE you can use a plain text editor for writing code, and can create and run a small community-grade Web site for free using Flex command line compilers, Flex framework components and Flex Data Services on a single processor server… For existing Flex 1.5 developers Flex Builder environment is a big improvement , but Java developers have seen it all and will think twice before reaching for their wallets.

I’m not in the position of giving Adobe advices, it’s just a voice from the trenches.

After the opening session, I’ve attended one hands-on lab on performance tuning, the gave and took an interview at the Java Community Corner and attended the session on Java 5 concurrent utilities.

This year’s JavaOne attendance must be the best ever. I have my own little indicator: Sys-Con Media put 6000 May’s issue of JDJ on the stands with publications. By the end of day all magazines were gone.

In the morning, one of the presenters said that if you had a lunch with someine you know, take away a point for this day. You must meet new people! The next important task was to attend as many parties as possible. I had plans for four, but managed to attend only three.

The first one was a cocktail reception for the press at 5PM. This was a really interesting gathering. I’ve chatted with John Rizzo, the creator of JavaBlackBelt.com, Matthew Schmidt from JavaLobby, Alan Holub, a very respectful Java author, Bill Roth and Patrick Linskey from BEA. This girl reporter from New Zeland have asked me if I am from France. I took it as a compliment. If these people left James Gosling at least for a minute, I’d talk to him as well…not this time. Because of the time conflict I did not go to the bloggers’ beer party…

The second one was the Parasoft’s party at 7PM. This was also a good one, but more business oriented.

The Tangosol’s party started at 9PM. I liked this one as well: about 200 people showed up. I had a chance to talk to Rick Ross from JavaLobby, Frank Greco from New York Java SIG… About midnight, we’ve started a technical discussion with Tangosol’s Cameron Purdy about existing solutions for implementing predictable and fast distributed cache.

Someone told me a horror story about a company that invited people to their party and started with the demo of their product. Big mistake. Huge.

Tomorrow I’m meeting with three vendors, attending four technical sessions and another party in the evening.

John Rizzo has told me earlier that my suggestions on improvement of his Web site are welcomed. Here’s the first one: people who managed to attend 5 JavaOne parties in one evening automatically receive Java Black Belt regardless of the number questions they’ve got wrong on multiple choice exam.

I like Europe, and SF has this European look and feel. Downtown in nice and clean, the weather is great and I “m sitting at the sidewalk caf eacute; drinking my morning coffee. Legions of backpackers with JavaOne logo are moving toward the Moscone center.

The general session opens at 8:30AM in a huge auditorium with at least five thousand people. The band of reggae musicians is playing on stage. You can feel the importance of the event.

John Gage, Chief Researcher from Sun explained how to use the JavaOne schedule builder and follow the changes in the schedule. He suggested the following:Meet people! Do not be shy. Eat lunch with people you do not know. If you eat with people you already know, take off some points of your Java attendance.

Jonathan Schwartz was the next. This the largest JavaOne ever. Java is successful because of JCP that has 1052 members. Not enough. Join jcp.org. Individuals have an enormous impact.

Ed Zander, CEO of Motorolla. The Internet is going mobile broadband. He showed several phones running Linux and Java. They are planning to ship 90 mil of phones within 6 months, and he urges everyone to start developing in Java.

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical., the first space tourist promised to ake Java available with Linux distribution.

Marc Fleury, JBoss came to stage in a nice red beret. He “s announced that they are joining .Net community. Jonathan presented Marx with a T-shirt that read I love NetBeans.

Rich Green, Sun Microsystems. He “s back in Sun for the last week and a half. Again, as yesterday, “Are you going to open source Java? rdquo;. Rich repeated: “Compatibility matters. It “s not a question of whether, but a question of how rdquo;.

Jeff Jackson, Sun, SVP spoke about Java EE 5.0. He’s announce their donation of JMS implementation to the oprn source. This followed up with a demo of ease of Java EE development, ease of AJAX development in Java Studio Creator and mashups of the Pet Store and Google maps. The Java EE .Net interoperability was next using a product called Tango.

To be continued…

If you like reading bloggers’ coverage of JavaOne, follow these Technorati links:

technorati.com/tag/javaone or technorati.com/tag/javaone2006

Pay attention to the sponsored links at Technorati. I was really surprised to find out that JavaOne went on sale at

the following online retailers/auctions:

Ebay: Looking for Javaone? Find exactly what you want today.

Amazon: Buy Javaone at Amazon.com Gourmet. Save 40-50% on Godiva Chocolates.

The PriceGrabber will be happy to compare the prices and find the best deal for you.

They write : Javaone. Compare instant bottom-line prices. Fast. Free. Easy. You save money.

Try searching for JavaOne at Google or Yahoo, and you’ll find more retailers to shop for JavaOne. Online advertisement still has some room to grow…

It “s Monday morning. Yesterday “s registration to the hotel was painless. Or as they say these days, it was 2.0. There was an electronic kiosk in the lobby. Just swipe your credit card, then touch the screen to select a room: smoking/nonsmoking, number of beds and the floor (the floors higher then 12th cost more, but I was not sure if my employer would be too happy to pick up this extra expense for providing me a better view of San Franciso). Bum hellip;The room key came out from the slot. I was done in less than two minutes..

In the morning, I “ve arrived to the Moscone center to see yet another example of the Registration 2.0. First, to the speaker “s counter. The barcode reader scans a piece of paper that I “ve printed at home, a special machine spits out my JavaOne card with a special electronic key embedded in it. After that I “ve repeated the same procedure at the Press counter to get my press pass ndash; they promise a reception for the press, and it would be stupid to miss it.

The next destination is a nearby hotel to register for the NetBeans Software day. Let me tell you, I “ve got a little used to 2.0 stuff hellip; I found a long line of people wanted to register at the event. The first 400 people will get a free NetBeans book, so each of us (early birds) received a little red sticker, which supposedly will entitle me for the book. After the first 20 minutes of waiting in line I though of getting back to the Moscone center: they run Java University there. But then I saw the sign that Jonathan Schwartz is opening the event and James Gosling is closing. I decided to stay. This is clearly the registration 1.0. After coming closer to the registration tables I saw the food: pizza, corn chips, dry fruits and soft drinks. OK, OK, it “s Registration 1.5. Got my pass, got my food, now hunting for the place to sit. The premium spots are on the floor by electric wall outlets. Forget about it. Get real. No big deal. I still have 85% of my battery left.

Hear the music? They are opening the doors and about 800 people are slowly filling up the room hellip;The fact that that 400 of them won’t get that book gives me this nice warm feeling! Yes!

And Jonathan Schwartz gave a talk. He started witha joke that he was tired of being #2 and not #1. He’s repeated a couple of times that his (and McNealy’s ) credo: “Innovation Happens Elswhere “.

I guess, he meant to say that as soon as you start believeing that innovation happens in your company, you are moving in the wrong direction.

Then, he invited Rich Green to the podium opening up with the words that now the creativity is in the core of the development at Sun.

After a brief talk, they started an improvised Q/A session right on the podium and the first question Jonathan asked was this, “Rich, do you want to open source Java? “The audience started to laugh and applaud.

Rich answered that we need to keep the platform un-fractured and need to come up with the plan to maintain the brand, compatibility, and then, why not?

Jonathan: “What “s the best part of being back in Sun? ”

Rich: ” Amazingly brilliant and creative people. ”

Jonathan,: “There is no better and no more aggressive leader, than Rich Green “.

After this talk we saw a demo of a a Java ME rapid development, and then two guys from Google, Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter gave an entertaining demo on code illusions.

Tom Ball from Sun demoed a JackPot: a tool that runs in through the source code of your NetBeans project, suggests and performs refactoring for you.

Robert Brewing, Sun’s Distinguished engineer, got several minutes to talk about Sun Tools: NetBeans, Sun Studio, Java Studio Enterprise, Java Studio Creator and Mobility pack. All these tolls will be added to the NetBeans platform. NetBeans now supports C and C++ development. Sun keeps donating tools to the open source community, which will be added to the NetBeans platform.

From James Gosling’s talk I’ve memorized this phrase: it feels like dot com era again, except now people have business plans with some positive numbers in them.

Finally, Jason van Zil, the founder of Apache Maven project came to the stage talking about, well Maven. Every speaker at JavaOne is dressed casually. But Jason went a little bit over board. He was wearing a shirt and a black wool sweater and shorts with beach slippers. He must be suffering some kind of body temperature disorder when the upper body is freezing while the bottom part always remembers the last Hawaii vacation. Poor thing.

At the end of the event, there was a raffle of five iPods. Now I need to pick up my free USB memory stick and a book and we can call it a NetBeans day.

The plain to SF has arrived 30 min earlier. Fly Continental! To my surprise, they still have free meals. To make it up, they charge for the headphones: “If you have your own headphones, feel free to use them. Otherwise, we offer you state of the arts headphones for five dollars “. I did not believe in state-of-the-art headphones for five bucks, so I did not purchase them. My laptop battery died on the plane in two hours. I need to find some time and blog about how to select a laptop.

The first night in SF I’ll be staying at my friend’s Alex home and he was gonna pick me up at the airport. We were friends with Alex from college, besides he’s the one of the best programmers I know. When I came out from the arrival area, the angry Alex was there refusing to accept $35 ticket for waiting for us in the his car in the arrival area. Cops in SF are different, and programmers as well. The cop did not warn Alex, but just announced that he’s got a ticket. It’s either $35 now, or $70 if we’d leave and the ticket would have to be mailed. Alex has chosen the second option. Any New York programmer would be happy to get away with $35. In a case like this though, NYPD would suggest to leave before giving the summons if the driver was present.

The Bay Area is a completely different world when it comes to programming. Working on business applications is considered a boring job here. It’s all about small companies and startups. People have ideas on the West Coast. Alex works for a company of 4 people. He casually speaks about meetings with executives of well known software companies: a CEOs can be sitting in the next cubicle. Another interesting thing: stock options is an important part of negotiating compensation when you are applying for a job. For example, a company ABC offers a particular salary plus 0.25% of a company stock, no, I’ll take the offer from XYZ, because it offers 0.4%. There is no guarantee, that any of these companies will be in business two years from now, but the early retirement is lurking…

I’ve asked Alex, if he ever worked on a boring 9-6 job, and he answered, “No “. After doing programming for 25 years, he always prefers a smaller compensation on an interesting job to a better-paid boredom. My kudos to you, Alex. On the other hand, on the East coast, Alex would have problems in finding employment. He’s an excellent Microsoft C++/Windows programmer who knows internals of this OS back and forth, but demand for such people is very limited on the East.

He goes for job interviews on a regular basis, which in many cases consist of solving some programming puzzles. He knows most of the answers… Surprisingly enough, he did not get an offer from Microsoft: he mis-spelled the name of one C++ function. He explained how it worked, but instead of initSomething(), he said createSomething(). How long would it take to google the name of this function? Less than one second. Microsoft has lost yet another quality programmer…

It’s Sunday morning, I need to check into my hotel and spend some time on sightseeing. Tomorrow, I’ll start immersing into the Java world by attending the NetBeans day. My son Yuri came to SF with me. He’s an artist and will be drawing SF-stuff while I’ll be busy at the Moscone center.

Alex and Lena, thank you for the hospitality, all the best to your family… Moving on…