Did you know that you can navigate the posts by swiping left and right?
Day one of JavaOne always starts with the Opening General session. This is Sun’s showcase for new Java technology. This year there was a JavaFX theme. JavaFX was launched last year at JavaOne, and is supposed to be the answer to Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight on the Java platform. This year they show a whole lot of apps created with JavaFX, and it was a lot of nice looking web apps. For closing, they brought out Neil Young and the announcement of his “collected works” on BlueRay disks using advanced java features.
After the general session I went to the JRuby talk. Not much new for me in the talk, since I’ve been following the project, but they had some very nice demos of what you can do with Ruby on the JVM.
After lunch I attended Joshua Blochs talk about More Effective Java, containing material from his second edition of the Effective Java Book. He launched a mnemonic for helping to remember when to use extends and super with generic wildcards: PECS (Producer Extends, Consumer Super) which reduces the problem to figuring out which is producing and which is consuming, and that’s kind of the hard part anyway. It’s a bandaid on a gushing cut. Generics are just not easy. The rest of the talk he spent on how to make effective use of enums, which was good, but didn’t really seem that useful to me.
For the final session of the day I chose a session about the new Java 7 language features. There were some interesting things here that I’ll make a separate post about later, but one interesting thing that they did not talk about was the closures debate. In stead the Java SE 7 spec lead Alex Buckley talked about the principles and considerations of language design, and at the end there was a long session about adding more annotation for better type safety. Like I say, I’ll talk about that in another post.
After this I wandered around the pavilion for a while, looking at the different stands.