JavaOne 2007

Lets summarize the most interesting things about JavaOne 2007 while the memories are still fresh. It was one of the busiest and most enjoyable conferences for me. One of the important trends this year is moving the entire platform to the Open Source. Java as a platform has always been one of the major foundations for the open source projects, clearly a leading development platform with very diverse and numerous projects build on top of JEE and SE. With SDK itself now open source as well, the number of opportunities even greater. Java 6 is also a technological leap forward with much richer set of tools and components. I had a chance to experiment with it quite a bit and my my personal experience with it nothing short of amazing. With first JDK beta announcement in December of 1995 this is the 12th anniversary. It created huge industry with every major vendor having stake in it. But the future opportunities are even greater. Java is a the major platform for mobile devices which clearly future of computing with mobile devices outselling PCs 20:1.

I was thinking about interesting way to present the success formula for the most synergistic set of technologies and came out with this: (Java + Linux) * GPL'ed software. Your millage may very, but I find this set of technologies the most relevant and dynamic for moving forward. There is of course a number of others, but they usually occupy a niche, while Linux in Java are everywhere from cell phones and micro controllers to server farms, clusters and grids. Java is also embracing emerging languages , you can run high productivity languages such as Python and Ruby natively on JVM.

I finally got “aha” on the convergence of 3D technologies into something that may be the desktop and collaboration tool of tomorrow. The environmental challenges, commute and globally distributed teams present interesting set of problems where 3D desktop with virtual working environment may offer a solution to allow people much easier to work together and remain productive and connected (including socially). You can finally have a water cooler conversation with your coworker from thousands miles away :-) , but most importantly have a meeting and share documents and the more natural(although virtual) three dimensional environment. Java 3D Desktop looked like a cool toy few years ago, now combined with virtual world (Wonderland Project) and communication channel (Darkstar) it shapes itself into much more powerful, interactive and very advanced collaboration platform. You can also start building 3D applications while continue to use traditional 2D ones.

It would likely to take hours do describe every other interesting piece of information from the conference, instead here is list of highlights by a category with links:

Keynote videos
Session slides
Java.net community presentations
My JavaOne photos | Flickr

Cool Stuff

• Nasa's WorldWind (Similar to GoogleEarth) is an OpenSource app! Try out F-16 Java 3D Flight Simulator
  
• Project Wonderland, Open Source 3D worlds, (Metaverse/SecondLife-like)
• Sun's MPK20 is Second Life for professionals
• IRIS photo editing java project
• Robotics, gotta see it
• Java(BDJ) is a part of BrueRay(70% of all shipping HD movies), (Check out "Open Season") Sony is looking for people with innovative ideas. Also check out Fox Contest
  

OpenSource, new software development paradigm for enterprise

• Customers don't want licenses, they don't want software, they want results that software delivers
• The old way is to hire a lot of smart people and feed them pizza day and night, open source is the new paradigm: distributed teams of highly motivated contributors
• Sun in the business to create shareholders a value through open source, creating wealth is the ultimate goal: you give your source away - you get back much more value
• Assemble solutions from a menu of available technologies
• "Hakers and Painters"
• OpenJDK is complete, licensed under GPLv2
• TCK kit is available for open source community
  
• Rich Client components are donated to the open source community by Oracle (link)

JavaFX

• JavaFX is a product family; it's about consumer focus; user experience over user interface, RAI
• JavaFX Script is a declarative language for creating RAI, it drives Java 2D API
• JavaFX for mobile: works on many different devices with different form factors: from PC, settopbox to a cell phone
• Check out JavaFXPad, NetBeans also has a plugin
• Currently technology preview, tools is coming
• JavaFX, used to be called Form Follows Factor (F3)

GlassFish & NetBeans

• GlassFish built with Grizzly NIO framework
• NetBeans + GlassFish = JRuby On Rails dev platform
• JMaki + Phobos + NetBeans + GlassFish = powerful high productivity visual development platform
• GlassFish kernel is only 100k
• Zend provides Java integration with PHP at RPC level
• NetBeans usage grew 92% last year
• Ubuntu ships with JDK and NetBeans today
• GlassFish supports JRuby, PHP, Python, innovative new multimedia technology IMS (Ericsson open sources IMS)

Wireless:

• SUN to open source Java based OS with JavaFX for cell phones
• In Macedonia Internet coverage grew from 2% to 25% in two months with deployment of WiMAX
• Motorola:
• New interface for wireless devices built around Tasks and Flows
• New platform build on open standards: Linux, Java
• Motorola sees WiMAX as an exciting new opportunity
• Opportunities:
• Wireless applications for events like Olympics
• Wireless dating, job search, classifieds
• How do we free media from PC the mobile?
• Offer services mobile workers demand.
• Personalization
• Socialization (We would like to talk with like-minded people)
• Commuting is big part of a day, catching up with news and video on the go is a growing trend specially in Asia
• 426,000 cell phones Americans retire every day
• Statistics:
  - four babies are born every second
  - 32 cell phone sold every second
  - in some areas like asia people get new phone every year
  

Performance and scalability, Other

• Java 6 is the fastest JavaSE ever, new faster update is coming out later this year
• Java software @ NASDAQ processes 150,378 transactions per second @ sub-millisecond speed, manages 3 trillions of dollars in value
  
• Debugging, tuning and monitoring applications in 3D?
• D-Light plugin for Sun studio is a great tuning tools , gives insight into what is going on at the OS level using graphs
  
• Most important trends in JEE 5, according to Oracle: SOA, WEB 2.0, Grid computing (virtualized pool of hardware)

Sun Microsystems Open Sourcing Java Technology!

Sun open sourcing Java is certainly is one of most important landmark IT events of this year. Congratulations to everyone at Sun Microsystems and also to the Open source community. Sun has proven its IT leadership once again. Perhaps we we’ll also see one day Free Unix distribution based on Solaris kernel, GNU tools and Java! That would be awesome. Java platform based software stack is a fundamental part of modern software, free and otherwise. Sun, we support you!

.. and RMS phrasing Sun ???, this is like a story from a parallel universe. Read all about it!

http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/

Google Closes YouTube Acquisition

Holy Photons!

Based on today’s closing price of $481.03 per share, the deal is already worth $1.775 billion to YouTube’s shareholders.

BTW, you have heard it first here a little more then a year ago:

http://myitbookmarks.blogspot.com/2005/08/projects-and-sites-that-create-large.html

Fedora Core 6 is out, first impressions

I had a chance to take Fedora Core 6 last week for a test drive. I have to admit this was the best experience I had with 3 D desktop operating system. Now I have migrated all my machines but a laptop to FC6. I was pretty happy with Suse 10.1, but I’m the RedHat and Fedora user for many years and just habitually more familiar with it. I'll totally expect you liking Suse 10.1 a lot more if you were using Suse before.

To date, I had a chance of trying 3D desktops on Vista Beta 2 and also XGL/compiz on Suse 10.1 and Fedora Core 6. This is the short recap:

• Vista – it’s a joke, plain and simple. 3D effects I have seen were very primitive; the entire installation was running very slow on a fairly up to date laptop with decent configuration - 2 GHz, 1gB RAM HP laptop.
• Suse 10.1 – I was a spell bound by XGL/compiz! The installation was very fast and straight forward. However to enable GXL I had to install ATI proprietary driver and it took me considerable amount of time to figure it out. It turned out that update utility that kicked in right after the Suse 10.1 installation, had updated the kernel but not its sources which are needed to compile the ATI driver. Driver installation script was complaining about the mismatch. It took me a while to figure out my way around "yast2" to get all the proper updates in. At the end it was really worth the time. I loved it. My system had appeared to be little sluggish after running for a while, but it could have been something I was doing. I was very happy overall.
• Fedora Core 6 – installation on my desktop with 82865G Intel video hardware was flawless. First I did an upgrade over FC 5 on my desktop at work. Once the upgrade was done, all I had to do is to install compiz and enable 3D desktop. I was done in 2 minutes! I was very surprised; it doesn’t get any better then this. I was expecting much fiddling around with proprietary drivers. The same day I decided to migrate to FC6 at home as well. Installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver was a challenge. For one, XGL is only works with beta driver and I had to fiddle little bit with it to get it to compile. Once compiled, the module was giving me an error while loading, apparently due to the kernel package architecture mismatch: i586 kernel + kernel-devel i686. After a bit a browsing and reading I’ve got everything working.

Conclusion: XGL and compiz are awesome! I will stick with Fedora Core 6. It works great, however it will likely to take another release on both distros to polish 3D desktop installation to the point when any Linux will be able to take advantage of it. Thanks to all people who contributed!

P.S.

1. Older vmplayer wont work, yout need to get an update.
2. XGL compatible NVIDIA Linux driver was released on November 8th
3. You can get ISO image torrents here:
   

Google Trends

Google had updated Google Trends yesterday. I was taking it for a test drive this morning. It is one of the Google's best hidden gems, an awesome tool. According to the trends data one can make a few conclusions. In terms of popularity:

• Ubuntu strong trend eats into the Windows XP share
• In Linux space Ubuntu is a strong leader, taking its share from RedHat while Suse and Debian keeping their share
• Java is keeping strong, .NET competing more with C++ then with LAMP or Java
• Apache is keeping strong and Tomcat seems to be fighting to unseat IIS from number two.
• MySQL is getting closer to Oracle and not very far behind
• Hibernate beats by far the other persistence frameworks and the trend is keep growing!
• Emacs rocks
• Browser wars
  

Here are a few perhaps even more interesting ...

• Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Jesus Christ, Prophet Mohammed
• George Bush, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Hugo Chavez
• Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson
• Good, Bad, Evil
  

Is it fun or what? :-) About Google Trends

and the winner is ... SuSe 10.1 (the operating system review continued)

Novell may become a household name again with the Suse operating system it is positioning to become the best Linux desktop on the market. It is really amazing what they were able to accomplish with Suse 10.1 integrating XGL, MONO and other latest innovations.

I was blown away by the Mono presentation by Miguel de Icaza at Microsoft two weeks ago.

I knew I wanted to give Suse 10.1 a try and I was wondering of how much fiddling around I would have to do to make XGL work. I was after XGL (3D desktop) and also after MONO (.Net on Unix). Well, it's all part of the package! Download your DVD and the only other thing you will need for the 3D desktop is the commercial video driver that supports 3D in hardware. The installation was trivial.

You can get your DVD iso torrent from here. Note: try to avoid downloading over http. It is not the first time I ended up with a corrupted image downloading DVD images with Firefox wasting more then a day. Check "md5" checksum before you install - it may save you tons of time. Look no further then GParted if you need to repartition your drive, resize your partitions etc. Download ISO image and you are ready to go. Gparted supports more filesystems then Partition Magic and it doesn't crash :-). You will need to change partition table using "fdisk" or "cfdisk" before you can run partition resize on them.

One caveat, if you are using Java Swing applications such us Netbeans or LimeWire, you will need to disable XGL because Swing will not work with the XGL.

There is one more reason for the Microsoft to be freaked out. Micorsoft made available Vista 2 and the next office Beta and all other back office offerings in June. I think they are feeling the heat from Apple and Linux. Vista Beta 2 is too slow, too late and too unusable. They really need a feed back like they never needed before. Windows became the most installed desktop operating system ever, thanks to the strong marketing push from the Microsoft, but there's competition and Microsoft may be just too big to respond to the challenge.

Here is a good article with detail instructions on how to customize your installation

Choosing an operating system

It's the first time I had to choose between 3 operating system for new development machine! I would gladly choose OSX (no brainer), but I don't have Mac :). That's basically narrows down the choice to the Linux and Windows. I've got latest Fedora 5 and Vista Beta 2. I have been using Linux exclusively for development for something like 10 years now. Lately however I found myself editing documents more often then developing code. I'm using XP on my laptop mostly because this is a convenient choice for "operating" Outlook and the Microsoft Office suite. A friend of mine bite the bullet and got the Apple laptop. I would probably get it too if I could get it for the office. At the time it doesn't seems to be the option so the choice then boils down to the two mentioned above.

Windows Vista Beta 2.

For two days I was trying to download the Vista DVD iso image from MS site. The site was on and off for couple of days coping with demand. Once I was able to download 3+ Gigs and then download had died. I had to start again next day only after burning corrupted image and finding out at the office that downloaded image was not complete. Wasting so much time and bandwidth is really unfortunate and I have hoped it would be worth the wait and time... Tip to Microsoft - post the torrent file next time - it will save you hundred of thousands in bandwidth and you wont have to take your site down.

Installation took about 3 hours to complete with several reboots etc. Sound card was not detected right away, but lately it did miraculously started to work. I sort of liked the look and feel of the operating system, but it seems to be very slow to respond. My system had 1 gig of ram and there seems to be no swapping, but the system scratching the disk all the time and also appears to be slow to respond. The security dialog that pops up all the time is really annoying and I'm sure not improving security or awareness of the risks. You learn automatically say yes or allow. How the hell I supposed to know whether or not it's OK for certain executable do certain things when I'm not even downloading anything.

Linux:

Installing Fedora Core 3 was a breeze - you can download the DVD image using bit torrent. Unity image contains all the patches up to date. Very cool idea and thanks a million to the unity team. Get Unity torrents here . If you rather prefer the official release you can get it from here.

Installation will take only half an hour and with a few very clear and "right to the point" directions you can get everything else you''ll need which is not on the DVD, you will get it up and running in no time.

In an hour you will be all set with the fantastic operating system! Vista Beta 2 sucks big time if you ask me. The new interface is the only good thing to mention, but it doesn't even come close to OSX. The only other thing that I've liked is the built-in speach recongnition.