JavaOne Day 3 Special Report 2006

JavaONE was a madhouse this year of information, product announcements and valuable information. Sun really tried to push the message of "community" this year by not focusing exclusively on their moves in the Java space and instead spending a lot of time focusing on the community in general and advancements occurring as well as partner ships. The new vision or attitude of Sun really shown through and was refreshing to see. This is the Sun I don't mind saying "We just need to figure out how to open source the JDK", because I honestly think they are trying. Sun also pushed NetBeans heavier than I thought they would with quite a few new tool showings that were very impressive. Everything from new editor enhancements and a lot more coming in NetBeans 6.0 to a slew of JEE 5.0 enhancements all the way up to visual BPEL and XML tooling.

This is what I expected at JavaONE to be honest: Sun, NetBeans and more NetBeans. That is why I was so surprised to see the turnout of not only the Eclipse foundation but companies basing products and technologies on the Eclipse platform readily available. I actually saw more products from 3rd party vendors that were based on the Eclipse platform than I did see based on the NetBeans platform.

BEA's Workshop Studio 3.0 with the new integrated NitroX functionality is a developers fantasy come true. Want to refactor the name of a Struts action? Go ahead. Want to CTRL-Click a resource bundle property key and jump right to it? Go ahead. Want to right click on a random project resource and see every point of reference to it in a graph? Go ahead. I do have to point out that this product is far from free, but for folks willing to pony up the money the value is undoubtedly there. I also got a chance to see some awesome work from Backbase with their AJAX GUI framework that is familiar to the W4 Toolkit work from Innoopract but designed in a slightly different fashion. This product will be shipping with the BEA product line soon as well.

Borland gave me great overview of the work they are wrapping up on porting JBuilder over to the Eclipse platform (called "Peloton"). I was sure to drill the product manager about the facts. Was this a port or a rewrite? Are we going to be seeing Swing wizards embedded in SWT windows? Were they porting over everything or leveraging existing Eclipse-based projects to build on top of? The answers were detailed and good news all around. Borland is infact rewriting huge portions of JBuilder on top of the Eclipse platform as well as leveraging Eclipse projects for each major functionality that they port over to build on. For example utilizing WTP as the web support in the new JBuilder, rewriting all the wizards and functionality to integrate into the platform and so on. Luckily a lot of the logic and processing that has nothing to do with the JBuilder or Eclipse platform was portable enough to pull over so it's not a complete rewrite. Either way the demo they showed looked pretty sharp, it's coming along nicely and will be a great addition to the tools space when it's ready.

I had a chance to speak with the gurus over at Cenqua about their upcoming Crucible product which looks like a brilliant addition to their already strong offerings. Any enterprise that is having growth problems that would like a complete bottom to top code-quality solution, I would strongly suggest you gave their product a glance. What I was happy to hear from them is a strong dedication to making Eclipse one of their premier supported platforms with new plugins they will be developing. More powerful tools? Better plugins? Sign me up.

I also stopped by Oracle's booths to catch a glimpse of the Dali work that they have donated to an Eclipse project and continue to enhance and work on it. Talk about slick, these guys are bringing a whole new level of great tooling for enterprise developers to Eclipse.

Naturally the Eclipse Foundation had a great showing with the Callisto release train work being shown off. I don't think I need to give my impressions of that work, we have all probably downloaded and been trying it since M1. For those of you that haven't, get ready for a much smoother and powerful out-of-the-box experience from the Eclipse guys for Java development from client all the way to server and more.

Overall the conference was a blast (and tiring). There was so much to see and absorb, but every project, no matter how obscure, was there showing off the power of Java. I was truly surprised by a lot of the Java applications in the embedded space (in controllers and so forth). If JavaONE taught me anything this year is besides the Sun hype, seeing all the vendors and names there this year with huge booth showings, it is that Java usage and deployment is blowing up. Now is a great time to be a Java developer because of the choices you have and how transferable your talent and knowledge is from one industry to another.

I'd like to thank the DeveloperZone team for taking all of this year and thank Sun for putting on one hell of a show. I look forward to seeing where everything is by the next JavaONE.

If you have gotten this far I want to thank you for reading and look forward to hearing from you on EclipseZone.

Until Next Time,
Riyad Kalla
editors@eclipsezone.com

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