Between June 14th and 23rd we went to San Fransisco for the JavaOne conference. This is our report from our experiences at the conference and of SF.
The JavaOne were held in Moscone Conference Center which is close to Yerba Buena Garden. Over 20.000 developers attended the conference with 9 parallell session tracks, over 150 Bird-Of-a-Feather sessions and more then 120 booths in the Pavillion. Sun has written an own overview of the conference.
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Each day started with a keynote speech. This is a short summary of these day by day, for further information look at suns JavaOne webpages were each days keynote can be find as video..
First day started with John Gage(director of Sun's Science Office) who were the host for the whole conference. He was followed by Alan Baratz(Sun), Jon Kannegard(Sun), Mike Clary(Sun) and James Gosling(Sun). Mike Clary said among other things that the Palm OS is the reference platform for J2ME(Java 2 Micro Edition). James Gosling showed the Real Time Java demo, two robots picking up a cone and handing it over to the other one without syncronization.
Second day: Greg Papadopoulos(Sun), John Gage(Sun), Danny Hillis(Walt Disney) and Bill Joy(Sun). Danny Hills talked about The clock of the long.
Third day: Patricia Sueltz(IBM) and Scott McNealy(CEO Sun). As usual Scott McNealy jumped on Microsoft.
Fourth and last day: Douglas Adams. Unfortunately there is no video from this speech. Douglas talked about some of his projects e.g. Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and how our view of technology has changed over the years.
Small devices and embedded systems with Java is becoming really popular. Several companies showed Java Card applications. Most of them though were some kind of secure payment system or identification system, little boring.
Java and Palm
Sun released the new Java 2 platform, Enterprise, Standard and Micro Edition. Most of the conference concentrated either on Enterprise or Micro. We found the Micro edition most appeling. It is also called J2ME(Java 2 Micro Edition or as prefered by some 'Java to me'). Sun released a first alpha version of the Micro Edition Virtual Machine, KVM or KJava. It was released both for the Motorola pager and the Palm pilot. John Gage did a very nice demo of this during the first days keynote speech. On his Palm pilot he had Tetris for KJava installed but not on his Motorola Pager, so he just beamed it over to the pager and he could play Tetris on the pager!
The KJava was a tremendeous hit as Palm were offering a special price on Palm V for only $199 with KJava installed. 10.000 Palm V were sold during three days!!!!
Suns KJava team had made a lot of hacking the weeks before the conference and where offering a lot of nice Java software. This software were preinstalled on all the Palm Pilots there were sold but every one with an own Palm Pilot had also the opportunite to install the KJava VM and the software in their Pilots. To do this and also hotsync there were over 900 HotSync cradles spread over Moscone Conference Center. Of the applications installed the following are worthed mentioning.
MySchedule - On the JavaOne webpage you could specify you own schedule for
the conference. This was indeed need as there were 9 parallell track with sessions
going on all day long.
News - An application with several news channels that were updated daily. Curiosly
even wheather for cast for the Island of Kauai.
Maps - Maps over the conference area. Very usefull!
Puzzle - When you started this application you got one of only ten pieces of
the pussle, to get the rest you had to find other attendees and beam them from
them. You could only beam once with another Pilot so you had to atleast beam
with ten persons to get the whole puzzle.The tenth piece was released the third
day but someone hacked the application so there were one circulating a day before.
The puzzle pieces were pieces of a map of an island, there was also a clue given
as the tenth piece and you had to guess which island it was.
Rumours - This was a very nice application were one should write a rumour and
beam it to others, but unfortunatly it was not used very much.
Missile and several games
Sounds API
Speech API both generating and understanding
Image processing
Java 3D
Java 2D
The TINI Board
TINI board from Dallas Semiconductors - a small circuit board with Ethernet interface and a Java VM. Alpha version released but a full version will be released in september for $50. With its ethernet interface they have built the world smallest webserver. Except ethernet it has also dual serial buses, i2C bus and CAN-bus.
Jini and Lego
Sun demonstrated MindStorm
robots and PalmPilots with Jini. The robots were controlled by the Palm
Pilot.
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Also the Jini Demo that was shown at SICS was shown at the conference.
The Java Concept car is built on a General Motors EV1 and enhanced with Java Technology.
Networking and socialising
JavaCard hunt, Puzzle Hunt, collect Java classes, spread Rumours
Gadget, Gadgets....
Nerd heaven
Shuffle Puck games, Arcade Games, Movies, Playstation and NintendosPC everywhere to read mail and surf
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Meeting with Jon Bostrom.
Newly opened Sony Entertainment center. They had the Sony Aibo robot dog.
One store with only playstation stuff and a Microsoft store with free internet
access(we tried to get back as much as possible from Bills fortune by beeing
here everyday and reading mail)
Stanford
Fry's Electronics
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