Here is my braindump from Information Overload Central, AKA Java One 2008.

Java FX Script

The day started with, you guessed it, another keynote. I just can't stay focused during them, so FWIW, here is what I got out of it.

• Sensors let you figure out whether people leave a keynote early.
• RFID tags are a mixed blessing. In passports, maybe not...Chief scientist John Gage: “Hi, I'm an American. Can you detonate the closest device?”
• Sun's VP for software Rich Green promises huge announcements, great surprises. He also says that Sun is the world's largest open-source software provider on earth.
• A fellow from Amazon (the shopkeeper, not the river) demonstrates the Kindle which, as it turns out, is a Java ME device. I never knew that. Actually, I think that is good news. Amazon quietly picked what they perceived to be the best technology for the job. That's a much more credible validation than the usual co-marketing arrangements (like those tacky “Intel inside” or “Designed for Windows” stickers.).
• Here is what was best about the Amazon demo. The fellow demonstrated how to buy a Java book. And which book did he pick from the multitude of choices? Yes, my friends: Core Java, authored by yours truly. He mumbled that it seemed to have good reviews.
• One thing that always bugs me about keynotes is when partner from company X appears on the stage to share ... absolutely nothing. Can anyone tell me what value the fellow from Sony Ericsson added?
• The highlight of the keynote was Java FX Script. The pitch was that there is intense competition for consumers' eyeballs, and that rapid prototyping and frequent iterations are essential to develop the killer UI that captures those eyeballs.
• There was a cool demo where an applet was dragged off the browser and dropped onto the desktop. I really liked that part. The applet—written in Java FX Script—also ran (somewhat degraded) in a low-rent ME phone. There was another cool demo with spinning video players, all running at a good speed.
• Delivery timeline: July 2008: JFX SDK EA. Fall 2008: JFX Desktop 1.0. Spring 2009: JFX Mobile 1.0
• The Glassfish 3.0 kernel is 98K.
• Open JDK ships in Ubuntu. (To my delight, there was a fair amount of applause from the audience.)
• Sun is working on Project Hydrazine. Find. Merge. Deploy. Share. Monetize. Huh? It has something to do with instrumenting Java FX apps and sending data back to the trustworthy service deployer, not the evil technology vendor.
• Jonathan Schwartz is much better at explaining stuff. His take on Java FX:
  1. More devices: Linux, Mac, Windows, embedded devices
  2. Performance (better VM)
  3. Insight (instrumentation)
  4. Free
• The keynote ended with Neil Young, a bard who pitched a multimedia project that chronicles his life work on a set of Blu-Ray disks. The UI was very pretty...Java-powered, of course.

A few months ago, I had asked Bob Brewin at Sun about the situation about audio and video codecs in Java and FX. He hemmed and hawed and mumbled something about how Ogg Vorbis wasn't really going to work out. The good news is that Sun now licensed the same codecs that are used in Flash, and there will be decent multimedia support going forward. It is just extremely annoying that codecs are so patent-encumbered, and it is yet more evidence that patents hinder, and not promote, the progress of science and the useful arts.

At the press cocktail hour, James Gosling was kind enough to give me some inside dope on JFX development. One of my graduate students, Sadiya Hameed, is working on reimplementing Java FX Script as a DSL. Whenever she showed me some code that she found in the wild, I thought “Whoa! That's a lot of math.” (Which, BTW, one of the keynote speakers said today as well.) As it turns out, a lot of the math is apparently auto-generated when a set of Adobe Illustrator files is transcoded into Java FX Script. The work flow is that the creative folks work in the tools that they like (and not so much in Java FX Script), and that the programmers work in the tools that they like (maybe Java FX Script for the front end, and definitely Java on the back end). Gosling also said that some of the tools were still pretty rough, which is why the keynote didn't show them off. That all made perfect sense. They should let him give the keynote next year.

EJB 3.1

I am a definite fan of JPA and EJB3, so I was keen on learning what is new in EJB 3.1. Fortunately, much of it centered on my pet topic, ease of development.

• No more boilerplate local interfaces. Session beans can be POJOs. Hooray.
• Packaging complexity bites the dust. No more EJB JAR inside the EAR. Hooray.
• Work in progress:
  • Standardized JNDI lookup
  • Component testing in lightweight container
  • Using EJBs in single SE client (lookup, injection)

It surprises me how many people still don't realize that EJB3 was a game-changer. Last year, it was still ok to complain about EJB bloat. This year, not so much.

Defective Java

Bill Pugh gave an amusing talk about “WTF code”. He is the inventor of the nifty Findbugs tool and regularly trolls for dysfunctional code (in unsavory places such as this one) to add more bug-finding rules. Here are some of the beauties that he presented:

• while ((c = (char) in.read()) != -1) { ... } 

  A char is a value between 0 and 65535, never -1...

• private final String lock = "LOCK";
  synchronized (lock) { ... }

  Literal strings are interned, so hopefully two programmers don't have that bright idea...

• synchronized(getClass()) { myStaticCounter++; }

  Let's hope nobody calls this from a subclass...

• DateFormat is not threadsafe...
• java.sql.Timestamp is not symmetric... (The audience's collective eyes glazed over at this point. An informal poll revealed that a large fraction was blissfully unaware of the instanceof vs. getClass() controversy in the equals method. This seems to be a lost cause. Maybe anyone who overrides equals in a non-final class needs to supply an annotation @IKnowWhatIAmDoing.)

Java Language Evolution

An interesting presentation about what to expect in Java 7 and beyond.

Rules:

1. Respect the past. No new global keywords (like enum, assert). “Restricted” keywords are ok (module, and hopefully, property :-))
2. Respect the future. Leave room for syntax to breathe. Counter-example: Maybe we'd like to have named parameters for ordinary methods in the future. When annotations with named parameters were introduced (@Foo(name = "fred")), the choice of = was a mistake, because you can't do foo(name = "fred") for ordinary methods. Had the Java 5 designers respected the future, they would have chosen something like @Foo(name : "fred"). Or not...wouldn't that conflict with BGGA control invocation?
3. Respect the model. Java is a general purpose OO language.

Principles:

1. High-level. (Express the idea, not the bits)
2. Covet clarity
3. Static typing
4. Loose coupling between language and API

Likely to be in Java SE 7:

• // Multi-catch
  try { .... } catch(X1, X2 e) { ... }

• Modules
• Annotations in more places

Definitely won't be in Java ever:

• Operator overloading

I want the multi-catch. Modules and better annotations are noble but dull. Did I ever mention that I want native properties? That I am sick of the boilerplate? I asked James Gosling. He said that there is a long stack of proposals on what to do with properties (I know...one of my students, Nikolay Botev, compiled a long list of them, and another, Alexandre Alves, implemented a javac extension to implement one.) And they all run against a brick wall when they try to deal with bound properties. I agree...bound properties are a lost cause. Let's just admit that and move on, with simple properties and a “restricted” property keyword!

Too bad I didn't have a chance to ask about that in the BOF. I had been a reviewer for the tools and languages track, and Sharat Chander, the track chair, took out all of the reviewers for dinner. Potentially little known facts: (1) Competition for slots at Java One is intense. We had over 300 proposals for maybe 20 slots. (2) Most of the reviewers—at least in our track—are not from Sun.