Day 4 at the Moscone Center began with the Sun raazmataaz where all real time applications of Java were at display. Mobile devices with rich Swing UIs, racing cars with Java inside, Java enabled robots etc. lighted up the Moscone Center for the last time in 2006. All of these high tech stuff was being conducted by James Gosling, the father himself, with a smile of satisfaction, that only goes along with an invention. Of course before the tech extravaganza, we had Scott McNealy giving away the Lance Armstrong tshirt to the winner of ride-your-bike competition in this year's JavaOne. Boy, what a shift in the paradigm - Scott was the CEO a month back when possibly he had prepared his keynote for JavaOne 2006. And now he got a 20 minute slot on the last day of the Conference for giving away tshirts!
There were some very good sessions lined up for the last day. I started with the one on EJB 3.0 delivered by Craig McClanahan, Linda DeMichiel and Gavin King. The session took us through the POJO slogan which EJB 3.0 could ultimately get out of its door. Linda described all the major architectural features of EJB 3.0, Craig took us through the JSF integration part, while Gavin King demonstrated some of the advanced applications of transaction handling using the architecture. EJB 3.0 is a much better incarnation than its predecessor, EJB 2.0, which was almost unusable. But still the capabilities of 3.0 are only a subset of what we have in Spring - experts are very sceptical and some of them has procrastinated EJB 3.0 as inferior and a big step backward from Spring. For more details, go through what Rick Hightower has to say in this JDJ article.
On popular demand, an introductory session of Ajax was repeated on this day - the one by Ben Galbraith. I decided to walk into it - at the end of it, I do not regret my decision. It was a very well delivered session with lots of information (mostly introductory though) on Ajax. The guy showed lots of real life examples of Ajax implementations including google maps, google suggest and some cool programming tricks and debugging how-tos.
On the whole, JavaOne 06 demonstrated to the world the awesome community that has been built around this technology platform. It has truly transcended all barriers of life and touched upon all walks of the social fabric. All said and done, the users want more from the technology which promises to be the ubiquitous platform of computing. A more viable licensing policy for Java, more enhanced JVM with support for functional languages, continuations, tail call, higher order functions etc. etc. .. the list goes on. I am always hopeful of a brighter tomorrow ..
And oh, BTW, the bookstore at the Conference was a smashing hit - I myself picked up five books for my collection at a coool discount of 20% ..
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