JavaOne 2007 Day 1: Brewin Talks

This morning we were extremely excited to learn about Sun Microsystems' JavaFX technology, which can extend the realm of possibilities for rich Internet applications. The JavaFX family also consists of JavaFX Mobile for portable devices and cellular telephones along with JavaFX Script, which can simplify the development of rich Internet applications. This afternoon Sun's Bob Brewin (Software CTO for Sun) took the stage to talk more about JavaFX along with the future of Java. From Brewin's talk there are a few interesting points worth noting.

Accompanying Bob Brewin to talk more about the future of Java was the Java SE Platform Lead, Danny Coward. Danny Coward had noted Java SE 6 is being adopted faster than any previous Java platform release with millions more downloads and upgrades. He went on to talk about features that will likely be found in Java SE 7 such as "super packages" at development time and "super JARs" at deployment, which will offer a number of benefits for both developers and end-users. Java SE 7 will also feature new Byte code for interpreting dynamic languages as well as being home to additions to the Java language itself. For the consumer, Java will have a modular "consumer JRE" by the start of next year. This modularized edition will feature a revamped installer and addressing some of the problems with the current Java Runtime Environment.

Following Danny Coward, Jerome Dochez (GlassFish Lead) had took the stage to share more information on the realm of new possibilities that will be found in Sun's GlassFish v3. Some of the new improvements will include a module subsystem with a kernel that is less than 100k in size and components with injection and life-cycle management.

While all of the topics covered this afternoon were very interesting, Patrick Hogan of NASA was very captivating when talking in detail about NASA World Wind for Java. Accompanying Patrick Hogan was Ken Russell who is the principal investigator for the Java Client Group. Demonstrated by Hogan and Russell was a F-16 flight simulator that used NASA's World Wind to provide the scenery along with an example of how World Wind could be used by independent programmers.

Getting back on track with JavaFX, it was referred to as "an architecture that scales". The scripting portion of JavaFX is object oriented, uses dependency-based evaluations, has a declarative syntax, and supports dynamic updates. It was also made known that JavaFX Mobile can be partially attributed to the recent acquisition of SavaJe Technologies. Larry Rau, previously CTO and co-founder of SavaJe, had highlighted that JavaFX Mobile can offer a compelling user interface and JavaFX is built upon Linux. While mentioning Linux and JavaFX, Rau had mentioned JavaFX Mobile could run Solaris -- if Sun Microsystems made a mobile Solaris kernel. Depending upon the success of JavaFX, we may very well see "Solaris Mobile" surface in the future.

To see more of our JavaOne 2007 coverage, click here. You can also discuss these new announcements in the Phoronix Forums. We will be back this afternoon with Duke's Choice Awards.

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