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At the opening keynote of this week's Oracle OpenWorld Conference, Sun Chairman and Co-founder Scott McNealy called the father of Java, James Gosling, on stage to again reiterate Oracle's dedication to Java. When McNealy asked whether Oracle is good for Java, Gosling recalled the old joke about ham and eggs: The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. In Gosling's characterization, Oracle--with its JSR leadership and Java-based product lines--is much more ham than eggs when it comes to Java.

But we know that already. The really interesting part of McNealy and Gosling's exchange came at the end, when McNealy voiced his doubts that the Moscone Center where the conference is being held was big enough to hold OpenWorld and JavaOne simultaneously. Some in the Java community have speculated that the 2009 JavaOne Conference this past June would be the last. The rumors have Oracle killing the show and holding some scaled down version of it during OpenWorld. What would that look like?

The largest convention center in downtown San Francisco has three halls, Moscone North, South, and West. Oracle needs all three, plus rooms at an off-site Hilton, to accommodate the 40,000+ attendees. Not to mention that Oracle blocks off the street between the facing Moscone North and South halls, lays carpet down on the street, and erects tents above it (129,000 square feet of tenting, that is). It's a huge production. How Oracle would host another 15,000 people (the reported attendance at JavaOne 2009) is a logistical challenge I'm glad I don't have to face.

There probably wouldn't be much overlap in attendees who go to both shows either. Fundamentally, the conferences speak to different audiences: OpenWorld is an enterprise IT show for executives, while JavaOne is a developer show for Java programmers. Just observing the unwritten dress code at each one makes the difference obvious.  Casual attire at OpenWorld is khakis and a button-down shirt with your company's logo embroidered on the breast pocket. That same outfit at JavaOne would be formal (What's with the khakis?).

Beyond the issues of sufficient space and differing styles is that of content. OpenWorld actually already offers content for Java developers. Oracle Develop is OpenWorld's three-day program dedicated to developer topics, and it held a number Sun-hosted sessions that were JavaOne-esque, including overviews and updates of JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1, Java SE, Java EE 6 and GlassFish, JavaServer Faces 2.0, and JavaFX. However, Sun is hosting only 10 out of a total of 217 Oracle Develop sessions--a fraction of the content JavaOne offers. Oracle would need to scale the number of sessions up significantly and find the room to host them.

Where Oracle Develop takes place also speaks volumes about the focus of OpenWorld. To get to Oracle Develop from the main show, you have to walk to a hotel about 10-15 minutes away. Shuffling off to the Hilton felt a little like being invited to a fancy dinner party and then been relegated to a wobbly ironing board in the den for your meal while the "grown-ups" (the IT executives) eat at the dining room table.

For Java developers, that feeling of being second-class citizens would be an unavoidable consequence if the shows merged. As the steward of Java, Sun constantly interacts with the Java community to help shape and plan JavaOne. During Goslings conversation with McNealy at the opening keynote, he confessed that Oracle was "a little unprepared for the volume of the Java community." Sun's developer programs, according to Gosling, are much larger in terms of downloads and interactions than those Oracle currently offers.

The developers who are downloading bits from the many java.sun.com projects, reading Sun distinguished engineer blogs, reporting bugs, and otherwise getting involved in the development of the Java platform make for an enthusiastic audience when Sun puts on a show just for them. (You won't hear the Brazilian contingent whoop and holler every time their country's mentioned here at OpenWorld, but you can count on it at JavaOne--and more than one keynote presenter has when his presentation starts to lose some steam.)

A backlash from developers who fear being marginalized in a merged OpenWorld/JavaOne likely won't be enough to save JavaOne if Oracle decides to end it; OpenWorld has swolled other conferences (PeopleSoft Connect and BEAWorld are just two). However, the audiences for the other shows it consumed have been more aligned with the IT executives who attend OpenWorld. With the logistical challenges and divergent audience, OpenWorld might choke if it tries to swallow JavaOne.

The new Sun boss put the OpenOffice and JavaFX groups on notice during the JavaOne opening keynote today: Produce some JavaFX libraries for the OpenOffice suite and do it quickly. Larry Ellison, head of the soon-to-be Oracle/Sun Java giant, said: "I've been meeting with different groups inside of Sun, and one of the things we're looking forward to is seeing libraries come out of the OpenOffice group that are JavaFX-based."

He offered spreadsheet and word-processing programs as the types of JavaFX application he expects. (Never mind that OpenOffice already has a spreadsheet program called Calc and a word processor called Writer.)

The two-hour keynote closed with a symbolic passing of the torch from the old “Chairman of JavaOne,” former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, to the new one, Oracle CEO Ellison. With so much speculation about how the acquisition will shake out for Java, both men had to address the topic for the largely developer audience. But their exchange was carefully worded because the acquisition has not yet been finalized.

As expected, Ellison reiterated Oracle's commitment to Java (Oracle’s entire middleware stack is 100-percent Java) and twice pledged to expand its investment in Java, which drew applause both times. But his most pointed remarks were the challenge to the OpenOffice and JavaFX groups and later wondering out loud why Sun/Oracle couldn’t produce mobile devices like netbooks or Google and T-Mobile's G1 phone, all based on the JavaFX platform.

In a setting where Ellison had to be particularly mindful of his words, choosing to declare these challenges publicly provided some insight into where Oracle will place its focus for Sun Java.

For you JavaFX devotees, hearing Ellison put the platform front and center has to be encouraging. At one point, he said: "We're very committed to seeing JavaFX exploited throughout Oracle and throughout Sun."

 

When Oracle bought Sun, it got Java. If you make your living in Java development, that statement can make you cringe, smile, or shrug—depending on how well you think Sun has handled owning Java, and whether you think Oracle will do better or worse. You might even believe that the Java platform is too entrenched for this deal to have any real impact.

For its part, Oracle announced the acquisition with praise for Java ("the most important software Oracle has ever acquired") and a commitment to keep it vibrant ("continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community"). And you don't have to take Oracle's word for it; the company's software products ran on the Java platform long before it decided to buy Sun.

So what's really going to change for the Java developer? Following the money may provide an answer. The Java platform has spawned countless development projects over the years with Sun providing the care and feeding—read: cash and staff—for hundreds of them. Sun spends billions of dollars in R&D every year, much of it going to Java-based innovation. (Java itself came out of the Green Project at Sun back in 1990.) The problem for Sun seems to be turning innovation into profits; being bought by Oracle may mean the end of R&D without ROI.

Oracle expects Sun to contribute over $1.5 billion to its operating profit in the first year, according to Oracle President Safra Catz. To fulfill that mandate, Oracle may start pulling staff and funding from Sun Java projects that don't immediately contribute to the bottom line or at least show promise of contributing in the near future.

Instead of worrying about Java itself, the types of questions Java developers really need to ponder are: What's the return on investment for JavaFX? Is it possible to monetize Project Looking Glass? What would the migration from Project GlassFish to Oracle WebLogic Server be like? And so on and so on for all those cool, interesting projects that aren't paying their own way. Soon, it may be the communities—alone—who keep them going.

Now—are you cringing, smiling, or shrugging?

Conducting an interview via email can be very convenient. I can formulate my questions exactly the way I mean them (avoiding my propensity for rambling), and the interviewee has the time to compose thoughtful answers that address my specific questions (avoiding his/her propensity for rambling). Plus, I get the complete Q&A returned to me in "cut-and-pasteable" text: No tedious trawling through my digital recording to transcribe quotable answers or deciphering my hastily-written scrawl while trying to write as fast as the interviewee talked.

Like most modern conveniences though, email interviews have their downside too. Not only do they forfeit control over when I will receive answers to my questions, but more importantly, they take away an essential interviewer's tool: the immediate follow-up question. Such was the case with this blog: An email Q&A with two members of the JavaFX team, JavaFX Chief Architect John Burkey and Senior Director of JavaFX Marketing Param Singh. The interview covers a variety of topics related to the recent JavaFX 1.0 release.

The interview wasn't completed as close to the actual release date (early December 2008) as I would've liked—the holidays not withstanding—and a couple of the responses beg for follow-up questions. But that's the price of convenience. I'll let you be the judge:

Sun's Zero-Sum Java Development:

DevX: With many Java developers clamoring for language features such as properties, closures, and data binding in Java 7 (not all of which will be included in that release) and fearing that Java is falling behind C# in terms of features, some view any development effort dedicated to JavaFX as resources diverted from core Java language development. How does the JavaFX team respond?

JavaFX Team: JavaFX is a series of technological initiatives, some of which just couldn't [be] done on top of the existing Java frameworks. Specifically, the industry is moving towards animation, visual tools, and scripting, all around a core of a scene graph. People are excited when we talk about these things, from traditional Swing developers, to visual designers who have never considered working in Java.

JRE and Applet User Interaction:

DevX: How does/will the JavaFX user experience (e.g., security dialogs, JWS downloading JNLP files, etc.) compete with that of Flash?

JavaFX Team: JavaFX is powered by Java, and hence leverages the underlying features and functionality of Java. For instance, JavaFX uses the robust and proven security model of Java. Consequently, JavaFX uses industry best practices for security for items such as cross-domain access and access to system resources.

DevX: If JavaFX is currently run as an applet in the browser, is there any way for a web developer to use JavaFX without placing applets on his or her web site?

JavaFX Team: No. Applets are just the standard container for doing JavaFX, managing the lifecycle of the JavaFX objects within the browser. However, we do have some nice features here, including bi-directional interaction with JavaScript, allowing very nice communication with the rest of the web site.

JavaFX Mobile:

DevX: Which mobile device manufacturers are the JavaFX team working with? If you can't divulge that, which mobile platforms will developers be able to use JavaFX with starting in spring '09 (announced release date for JavaFX runtime for mobile devices)?

JavaFX Team: Sun works with most of the major telecommunications carriers, operators, and OEMs with Java ME. Sun is working closely with these partners to bring JavaFX Mobile to market.

Sun will announce key partners around Mobile World Congress and will continue to roll out partners at other key events.

DevX: How soon do you plan to support JavaFX on Android?

JavaFX Team: Sun is committed to delivering JavaFX Mobile runtime on a wide range of platforms (device/OS combinations) that our partners demand. Sun has demonstrated the potential to deliver JavaFX Mobile on Android at JavaOne 2008.

DevX: How will the JavaFX team address the issue of provisioning JavaFX applications to mobile devices?

JavaFX Team: [Through] a standard set of tools to allow developers to deploy to mobile devices, as well as emulate those devices on Desktop. Over the next few releases, expect these tools to get better and better.

DevX: What portions (if any) of JavaFX will be left out of JavaFX on mobile platforms?

JavaFX Team: You won't be able to call the Desktop profile, which includes Swing-based API's on Mobile, and in fact, we encourage you do stick to our "Common" architecture, which is a focused set of API's enabling next-generation media and graphics, as well as effects and timeline-based animations.

Language Interaction and Web Service Support:

DevX: Besides Java, which other programming languages (or scripting languages) does JavaFX interact with and at what level?

JavaFX Team: There is a bi-directional JavaScript bridge, which allows deep access to our JavaFX API, or DOM. In addition, JavaFX is built on top of Java, and calls into any Java API in Java SE just as a Java applet would.

DevX: With JavaFX 1.0's added web service support (calling RESTful web services and making asynchronous HTTP requests that return XML or JSON), is this how Sun recommends JavaFX clients communicate with server-side applications? Are there plans for additional web service support capabilities in the future?

JavaFX Team: We fully support RESTful web services and the web standards, but will continue bringing more capabilities to the platform. There are several things in play, enabling easier tie-in with more sophisticated web services.

Open Source Roadmap and JavaFX Gadgets:

DevX: What's open source today? What will be in the future? What (if anything) never will be open source?
 
JavaFX Team: Sun is committed to open source. Key parts of the JavaFX platform are in open source, including the JavaFX compiler.

DevX: Do you intend to release a set of JavaFX-based gadgets any time soon, or do you plan to leave it up to the community to develop them?

JavaFX Team: Yes, in addition to the great work already occurring in the community, we have a standard set of gadgets coming in the next several releases.

"Not Invented Here" Questions:

DevX: Instead of JavaFX Script, why not just adopt Groovy, which already had all the necessary language constructs and was quite mature?
 
JavaFX Team: JavaFX Script is designed specifically for doing visual scenes, and because it is a statically compiled language on top of a world-class virtual machine, it is quite a bit faster than Groovy, as well as being more expressive for visual scene construction.

DevX: What features in JavaFX couldn't have been implemented directly to the Java language with some minor enhancements, such as Properties (with data binding) or the {} construct (like in Groovy) to cut down on the verbosity of the code?

JavaFX Team: JavaFX script is a scripting language, and as such is built for fast declarative style coding, and takes as its precedents several scripting languages. The entire look of the language would be different if it were a Java derivative. Both Java and JavaFX script are important languages.

Editor's Note: Thanks to DevX authors Edmon Begoli, Jacek Furmankiewicz, Anghel Leonard, and Jim White for contributing questions for this interview.

Google launched its largest and first paid-admission developer conference, Google I/O, yesterday in San Francisco with a 90-minute keynote session to show off a number of its web development products and initiatives. The message of the presentation, titled "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" and led by Google Engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra, was nothing new; much of it echoed O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" conception, Salesforce.com's and BungeeLabs' platform as a service (PaaS), and the Sun Microsystems corporate motto, "The Network Is the Computer."

Gundotra explained Google's high-level goal as moving the web forward by enabling web developers to:

1. Access the cloud more easily (with Google App Engine);
2. Leverage more power from the browser (with Google Web Toolkit); and
3. Maintain pervasive connectivity in their applications (with Android and Gears).

Google App Engine
The PaaS pitch for developers was Google App Engine: Google will host their applications on its servers for free and charge only when the applications exceed either 500MB of persistent storage or the bandwidth and CPU necessary for 5 million monthly page views. Although the pricing model won't be finalized until the end of the year and App Engine is still in preview, Google announced open signup for all interested developers. Developers need only sign up, develop the web applications on their local machines, and deploy them to Google. Launching the application then is just a matter of serving the application's URL to your end users. However, the App Engine runtime environment currently uses only Python. Google is considering other languages and runtime configurations for future releases. So if you're not a Python developer, you'll have to learn the language or wait.

Google Web Toolkit
The announcement of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate (GWT 1.5 RC) was Google's effort to make the browser more powerful. GWT uses an optimizing cross-compiler to convert Java code input, written in the IDE of your choice, into compiled JavaScript output for target browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari). GWT 1.5 RC adds full Java 5 language support—the most requested feature from GWT users, according to Bruce Johnson, Google's GWT engineering manager.

During his demo, Johnson explained that when developers write an application directly in pure JavaScript, they're responsible for optimizing and maintaining that code themselves.  But with GWT, developers write applications in maintainable Java code, and the cross-compiler produces the fastest JavaScript possible for that application—with no concessions to maintainability.

If you like the GWT functionality but code in C#, check out Script# as an alternative. 

Android and Gears
The Android and Gears demos filled the pervasive connectivity role. Android Engineering Director Steve Horowitz demonstrated the much-talked-about mobile development stack on a mobile device. The home screen featured the typical items you'd expect (e-mail, Internet, contacts, etc.), and Horowitz's touch-screen navigation would've had more appeal if the iPhone hadn't already been on the scene. But things got interesting when he pointed the WebKit browser to Google Maps. Horowitz set the device to Compass mode while viewing a Google Maps Street View of the San Francisco waterfront. Holding the device at arms length, he turned around 180 degrees in either direction and the Street View moved in relation to him, providing a sweep of the waterfront image. That trick drew applause.

MySpace's Senior VP of Engineering, Allen Hurff, conducted the Gears demo. A browser plug-in, Gears (formerly Google Gears) uses a local server, database, and worker pool to enable users to interact with web applications while they're offline. Hurff showed this capability by doing a full text search of his 300-plus MySpace Mail messages without calling back to the MySpace servers. Each search term he entered dynamically narrowed his messages to only the matching results, and the search was powered completely by his local machine.

The keynote's message of "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" was nothing I hadn't heard before. But what made it compelling was that it came from a child of the Web era (you could say the poster child—in the canon of web-based services alongside Amazon, eBay, and now MySpace). Google itself was born of open standards/open source software, the Internet as the platform, and the proverbial web company founder story: two computer whiz kids in their college dorm room with a brilliant idea and no money. What's possible for those kids—and whiz grownups—today? Google believes it has the tools to help them find out.

Yesterday at JavaOne, Sun Microsystems announced support for the BDLive.com Developer’s disc. So, what is BD Live? It consists of software and network services that allow the quick creation of user-friendly DVD-like experiences. You can find a link to the free developer disc on www.apifinder.com (supplies are limited).

The developer disc includes sample code, definition of available API’s, and allows for collaboration. This includes the ability for developers to download each other’s applications to their home theater.

If I didn't know better, I would've thought I was at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Vegas yesterday morning instead of the opening keynote at the JavaOne 2008 Conference in San Francisco. Demos featured handheld book readers and graphics-rich "eye candy" applications on mobile devices, desktops, and the web; video presentations featured young hipsters immersed in the pop culture content and communication features of their mobile devices; and much of the talk from Sun Software EVP Rich Green centered on the consumer's digital life and rich experiences on various devices. So what's all that stuff have to do with Java? The devices all run Java, and the JavaFX Runtime that Sun announced during the session attempts to allow seamless portability of Java SE and ME applications among all devices through the Java platform.

 

Enter the theme for JavaOne this year: Java + You (if you're reading this, you're probably a Java developer and that "You" likely is closer to the 2006 Time Magazine Person of the Year than to you in particular); it refers to consumers, graphic and web designers, and scripting language programmers who use PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, and others. Sun continues to court designers and scripters by making the Java platform more accessible to them, largely because their numbers are much larger than those of core Java developers. With enterprise Java entrenched in data centers all over the world, Sun can—and has—turned its attention to higher levels of the software stack—focusing sharply on RIAs (rich Internet applications) for desktops,  mobile devices, and the web, and their ability to leverage features of the underlying Java platform. JavaFX is another step in that direction.

 

I wasn't overly impressed when Sun first announced JavaFX at last year's JavaOne, but this year, the demos (more to come on those) showed that Sun has worked to close the gap between a JavaFX vision and real JavaFX technology.

 

Stay tuned to the DevXtra Editors' Blog for more details from JavaOne...