JavaDay, JavaOne - Java Thoughts

I was attending Sun's Java Day this week, here in Israel. The main themes Sun is pushing are JavaFX and MySQL.

Some thoughts on both, as well as other topics.

JavaFX

Sun's interest here is clear. Every handset or any sort of device running JavaFX means more licensing fees for Sun. In fact, JavaME is one of the only Java environments which Sun's really see money from, at least for now. This would probably change in the future with much more agressive sell of JavaSE licenses for extra features and support, but still handsets is a very important addressable market, competing with others technologies such as the simple browser, Android, iPhone Objective-C, etc. Sun interest is to have as many applications as possible running on top of JavaME, JavaFX and LWUIT (the last two are a bit competing on the same square). More applications means more consumer power (consumers who want to run these applications) thus more pressure on the handsets manufectures to have JavaME and JavaFX on the handset, droping the required license fee at Sun's pocket.

All fine till this point. But now it comes to JavaDay event, or JavaOne conference in SF. These events shall reflect what interests the Java community, be judgmental, compare competing technologies. But instead it becomes more and more a marketing event for what Sun is trying to push. Thus, JavaFX catch very high percents of all sessions (even a session on Maven had to be called "Deploying JavaFX apps with Maven" or something alike to get in...) And it is totally lacking the critic perspective, comparing with other competing technologies such as Android, GWT, zool, YUI, Adobe AIR etc.

Is JavaFX interesting? probably yes, but not at the amounts poured at us.

As for the judgmental perspective, I'm missing in JavaFX the separation between content and style, without that this would be a step back. Does JavaFX work with CSS? not that I know of. Is there a similar alternative? The declarative approach of JavaFX is good, but why the choice of JSON-like declarations and not XHTML? The language is very close to Groovy, but not exactly the same (Groovy is from Spring creators), is there a path to consolidate these two new scripting languages? And why should we go with a propraietary environment and language, and not with W3C standards adopted by the browsers running on mostly all handsets? ... Yes, I know there are answers for some of the questions above, but in the huge time dedicated for JavaFX, alternatives, as well as known flaws and drawbacks, were not discussed.

Which brings me to the thought that independent Java events, such as Devoxx, are a better meeting place for the community.


MySQL

This was another theme at the event. MySQL is a powerful tool, the regulator shall take it out of the hands of Oracle to preserve competition.


Java Reference App

Together with Ronen Perez, I was presenting a session called "Java Reference Application - putting all the buzzwords together" focusing on our selected libraries and tools.


Java Community and New Technologies

It's good to see all these smart people together. Being smart, people follow the trends and new technologies carefully, asking "what is it for me? how does it make my life easier?" In the past you could see people enthusiastic about any new thing, today you see people much more careful and reluctant. It's either that we are fed up with disappointments from previous "innovations" or that the pace of things require us all to be more cautious and conservative. This, together with the competition between technologies, requires new technologies to be well cooked and invest much more effort in getting us in.