Keynote was great. These things are really about getting excitement about the technology going, and it certainly succeeded. The big news really is JavaFX at the moment. The runtime will start to be distributed via the Java 6 Update 10 (J6u10 from here) formerly spoken of as the consumer JRE. Having given Flex a good kick of the tires, I’m really excited about JFX. It’s the possibilities of writing Rich UIs that run universally in a browser that you can detach and run as a desktop application, for which you can take the same code and run it on a mobile platform – JME, Android (looking forward to finding out what that’s about) etc. or on a PS3. Very, very cool stuff. The JFX media framework is awesome – 3D rendering, high definition video, high def sound. Makes for an amazingly impressive demo. I was talking the day before to a couple of guys about the capabilities of the various RichUI techs – Flex, Silverlight and JavaFX. The latter seemed an also ran, but with stable implementations coming out in the coming months, I’m not sure that our conclusions of still stand.
App server modularity is the trend of the moment. The new Glassfish container is 98kb! Makes for an interesting idea – what is the app server, and where is it? When a server can run on a mobile, what are the new possibilities? How does this change things? I don’t know, but it bears thinking about as it is definitely the trend forward. Glassfish, Geronimo, JBoss, now Spring App Server. The monolithic server’s days are numbered.
T-shirts galore, plenty of cool ideas floating, some half-assed ones. Body count: 1 broken camera, 1 dead laptop battery and 1 lost power adapter. Day 2 ahead!