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July 1, 2005

JavaOne San Fran 2005

I was lucky enough to go to the JavaOne conference this year in San Fran and it was a blast. I thought I would post a few of the things I saw that were cool and what is going on in the Java world.

First off, Annotations are the bomb. The future of Java started with J2SE 5.0. Annotations are changing EVERYTHING. EJBs, Persistence, JAX-WS, JAXB, EVERYTHING is now reliant on annotations and it makes our lifes as developers 100% easier! No more descriptor files, no more XML files mapping fields in an object to columns in the DB.

Second, the desktop is getting easier to program for. All that custom code you wrote for Splash Screens, Thread Pools, Tray Icons, etc are all either in the JDK, or are going to be in the Mustang release (Java SE 6...yes, they changed the naming convention again...Java SE 6, Java EE 5, Java ME, etc). Swing supports TRUE double buffering so no more big grey rects on refresh, new modal states that fix that annoying dialog behind you netbeans window preventing you from doing anything but beeping a lot among other things. Check out JavaDesktop for more cool stuff.

Looking Glass 3D is still getting better. I'm thinking about playing with that one myself. They now have a webstart version for all to play with! They also had one of those Sharp Laptops with the 3D screen that was pretty cool, but I think it would drive you a bit nutty after a while.

XQuery is the next big thing in XML and will take us even further into the searching area. It is unbelivable what you can do with XQuery. It is just like SQL for XML. It rocks.

Java is everywhere. It was intresting to see the numbers. There are way more Java enabled devices in the world than PCs (like 2.5x more). Brazil is doing awesome stuff with Java in their health department. Java will be in EVERY BlueRay DVD player (yes, that would include the PS3) and they will ALL have a network connection. The BlueRay standard uses Java for all of it's interactive features like menus, subtitles, etc. It rocks.

The lines were crazy, Dennis Miller was funny, the weather was on and off, but all in all was pretty good. I really hope I'll get to go again next year. It was a great learning experience. The only bad thing is that almost everything you learn about you can't use for another year! Oh well, at least we know what to look forward to. Thanks for a great time Sun!

P.S. If you want to know more, post a comment! Ask questions!

Posted by Andrew at July 1, 2005 12:19 PM