JavaOne So Far

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

JavaOne is well underway. It's been great so far. We had our demo in the technical keynote this afternoon. It was short, but everything worked smoothly. I'll have a lot more to say about it later. Perhaps I'll throw in some screenshots and a narrative, similar to the keynote demo I did
last year.

So by now it's no longer a secret: I don't work on Creator anymore, and haven't for about nine months. I'm on a new project, Project Semplice (pronounce that in Italian, by the way). This does not mean that Creator is in any way losing momentum - there are two new developers working on the page designer for example. But having been on Creator through two full releases, it was time to try something new. And the new project works on adding a new language to the VM. That seems like a major theme of JavaOne this year. We can accomodate multiple languages on the platform - both in interpreted mode ala JSR 223 Scripting Engines as supported in Mustang, as well as languages that compile down to class files just like .java files. Saying that I work on a "new language" may be a bit misleading: we're trying to target a language inspired by Visual Basic. There's no suitable marketing name for it yet, so in our slides, we're just referring to it as BASIC. Or, for a real mouthful, Project Semplice BASIC. We're going to have a technical session on Thursday at 9:45 (note the time! It changed from its original 1:30 timeslot). We'll have a lot more demos and in-depth coverage of aspects of the language.

Tonight we're having a session for the Java Posse. We're going to record a live session. The session is packed (according to pre-registration numbers). We've been promising on the podcast that we'll have a keg. That was the plan. Two-three years ago, when we launched Creator, we had a "Meet the Creator Team" session, and we brought a keg. We thought we'd just do that for our Posse BOF as well. But we discovered today that the BOF is going to be held in a nearby hotel, not Moscone center, and they have a no-keg policy!! They -do- allow us to have beer served - but we'd have to pay for each and every bottle of beer served, at $7 per bottle! With a couple hundred people attending that's going to be quite expensive. After all, this is just a hobby project for the four of us, un-affiliated with our jobs. We have no sponsors (which is why the podcasts have no commercials in them), so especially with some recent recording gear expenses, it's just not within our budget. So a big apology to those of you who are planning to attend the session purely based on the free beer we had promised :(

NetBeans Day yesterday went well. I was particularly impressed with some of the new demos I hadn't seen before -- like the new Subversion integration. I can't wait to get away from CVS! I also really liked the XML tools support. The platform development and the Java EE 5 demos were impressive as well, but I had seen that before and new stuff always has more appeal. I spent the evening with people I met randomly at the end of the event along with the Java Posse. We recorded several great interviews that we will publish as soon as we get time to edit them. One of the interviews were with findbugs founder Bill Pugh, and author and consultant Brian Goetz. It was a great interview covering subjects I think all developers find interesting -- bugs, tricky bugs, detecting bugs, concurrency issues, and so on. We also interviewed Steve Northover, the SWT lead at IBM. We've also got plans to interview the Swing guys this week (who did a fantastic keynote demo!), so that should be a nice pair of compare and contrast episodes.

I'm having a blast. So much fun that I can tell I'm losing my voice. I did this at the Java Polis conference back in December too. Hopefully I'll still have some speech left for the Posse recording session tonight.

Anyway, the big thing I want to get across with this blog entry is that you should NOT miss our technical session on Thursday, TS-3576, covering the new project - BASIC for the java platform! The other two speakers are the other two guys on the Semplice team: Herbert Czymontek and John "Get a blog" Kline .