I am now home from my Bay area adventure at Java One. This was the first conference I’ve attended since 2005, and is by far the largest conference I’ve ever been a part of. I was blown away by the scale of this one. The downtown core was plastered with Oracle and Java signs. Buses dipped in oracle insignias roamed the streets constantly, and you couldn’t walk a block without seeing at least 5 people brandishing Oracle swag. (I quite liked the back pack that they provided).

In addition to the sessions (which I’ll get to next), there was a steady stream of entertainment events for the benefit of conference attendees. Union square (and a few other locations) were blocked off for music performances; and then there was the “fan appreciation” event featuring Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon. Doesn’t sound like nerd conference, does it?

The Sessions

My reason for attending was the sessions. From Sunday to Thursday my schedule was jam packed with talks about topics ranging from JavaFX to MongoDB and a smattering of Java ME, iOS, and Android development. For any given one hour slot, I had to choose between 2 or 3 talks that I really wanted to see, and another 8 or 9 that would have been interesting. Being able to hear about new technologies directly from the people who are behind it is awesome. It imparts a kind of understanding that cannot be achieved through a book or reading blog posts.

This conference has sparked a fire in me to seek out more conferences like this, similar to the way that a my first exposure to Disneyland led me to look for other parks that offer the same experience. In fact, the way a child reacts to his first experience at Disneyland is an accurate way to describe my reaction to the conference schedule.

The Topics

Currently I have a number of desktop applications that have been developed in Swing and have been deployed as applications on OS X. Therefore, I was most interested in learning about Swing’s successor, JavaFX, and how to deploy applications on OS X. The conference was heavy on JavaFX (yay!) but a little light on OS X. There were two talks on OS X deployment, but sadly I could only attend the first one (which way a fantastic talk, by Scott Kovatch). Nonetheless, I have left the conference with stockpiles of new ammunition for building applications with JavaFX. In fact, I’m really exciting about using JavaFX and Scene Builder (the GUI editor for JavaFX) to start building some business applications at work.

The demos provided by some of the community served as proof of concept to me that JavaFX is something special. E.g. Gerrit Grunwald’s (@hansolo_) set of gauges in the JFXtras project show what can be achieved with a little time and artistic flair.

On the OS X front, it looks like we’re all set to go now with the Mac App store. The javafxpackager tool provides the ability to easily deploy applications as native bundles. This is a new direction for Java (up until now, they have been recommending Web Start distribution), and I think it is a good one.

Another topic that I am keenly interested in is mobile development (iOS and Android). Last year’s java one included a demonstration of JavaFX running on an iPad, but then nothing more was heard. This year they announced that JavaFX will be available for Java7 SE Embedded, and they had a conference scheduler application running on an small, embedded device in a kiosk at various stations in the conference. But there were no announcements about JavaFX for iPad or Android. The announcement of its availability on embedded devices is a step in the right direction, though, as this is a prerequisite for running on the major embedded platforms.

I did attend one talk (actually 2 talks on the same topic) on Java for iOS and Android. The CodenameOne project (that I’ve blogged about before) is a java library and framework for building cross-platform mobile apps (i.e. deployable on Android, iOS, Blackberry, and J2ME). This looks very promising.

When I had reached my saturation point on JavaFX, I wandered across to the Parc55 building for a couple of Java Enterprise Edition talks. I attended a talk on the new Project Avatar, which provides a thin-server approach to web applications (i.e. most view logic and layout is handled on the client in javascript, and the server just sends over the data). This project looks quite interesting, both in concept and execution. The concept coincides with much of the more recent development I’ve been doing with Xataface.

The last talk of the conference that I attended was on NoSQL and scaling strategies. There, Nike’s director of engineering discussed some of their architectures for handling heavy traffic with NoSQL databases and Data grids.

My head is full. My notebook is full. Now to put all of this new knowledge into practice.