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What hit my buttons at JavaONE
I'm in the process of getting together some more detailed assessments on the delights of JavaONE last week, but in the interim here are the topics that I found 'hot' in the Moscone Center's cool environs...
- Open DS
Top of the list, Open DS was a great piece of software that made it dead simple to create a directory service a la LDAP. Including all the , this simple open source project provides scaleable, distributed, replicatable and driver-less storage, and it's planned to be extended to other directory services beyond LDAP in the near future. - Rails in GlassFish, on top of the JDK (and not forgetting IDE support for Ruby in NetBeans)
This was a great moment, although obviously contrived by the guys involved in the scripting interface to the JVM for the announcement at JavaONE. For the first time I was able to see a Rails application running on top of a JEE container, Glassfish, running in turn on top of the JVM. This is great news to anyone developing with Ruby and Rails as this means that my applications can just as easily be deployed to a production-class JEE web container as my existing JEE apps. And since this is all made possible because of JRuby and the scripting extensions to the JVM, I can even have my code healthily interacting with Java code should I see fit. I thoroughly recommend that you download the Netbeans 6 beta with Glassfish (the JEE components) to see this working, plus NetBeans is a pretty nifty Ruby editor as well. - Java FX (script)
Part of the Java FX family, the script component could either be a case of too little too late, or a great success in creating rich content applications. So far I'm not sold, although I've only had a go at creating a few applications so far. To me it just seems like another scripting language, except that this one does not easily run straight in the browser (the demos require Java Web Start, not exactly seamless or ideal) and since with almost the same amount of code in Flex I can build some sassy rich content front-ends as the equivalent code in a frame-based hello world in Java FX Script, I'm not convinced by this one yet. However, others are finding this pretty exciting so I keep it here just in case I've missed a massive Gotcha.
Those were the big highlights for me, there was lots and LOTS of other useful information being spread around the various technical sessions but those were the biggies for my money. Over the coming weeks I'll try and demo a lot of these innovations as they find their way into my projects, starting with Open DS and how that can work alongside with Rails...
... more to come soon!
Russ Miles
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