JavaONE 2008, Day 1, Tuesday

JavaONE 2008, Day 1, Tuesday

The demonstrator then cranked up the number of frames very quickly from one frame to two, and then ten frames. We could not believe our eyes. Is this Java rendering video frames without jitter, interference, and mapped into 3D? The best part of the demo was the mapping of the render video frames on to 3D OpenGL scene graph object. They called this demonstration The Video Ball and rendered they claim 200 video streams in animated planes, rolling in to football and also mixed the audio said streams. The Java Media Component is going to be biggest important Java innovation!

Dear Reader


(Apologies in advance for any typographic errors that may appear)

Here is everything we were hoping for with rich media client technologies. Yours truly is talking about JavaFX. There is a challenge to Sun Microsystems to increase its revenue and return of investment as more devices are built using the Java brand and the virtual machine.

The keynote in the morning pumped the tag line Java + You, the clear emphasis on the consumer, social and community side of the technology. In my opinion, the message could have been JavaFX + You, but obviously it was not. Sun Microsystem's Executive of Software Rich Green showed us with a couple of shock and awe demos that they are clearly serious about pushing JavaFX in the RIA market place.

Nandini Ramani was brought in on stage to demonstrate , a JavaFX Applet based on the Consumer JRE beta (Java SE 6 Update 10), which showed off the more performant and modular Java Kernel. The RIA applet permits the user to connect to Facebook and other web service vendor and get updates on their friends activities. Then, something amazing really happened. She drag the outlined hub of the applet outside the browser frame and release it. The applet suddenly vanished and reappeared working in full. Wow!

This was very impressive, because it meant that the browser could be closed and the applet would still be running in a secured environment. The second advantage was this applet was the same code, the exact same Java archive (JAR) file. In other words there was no programming changes made to make detachable applets as far the audience were aware. At JavaOne, last year, 2007, Sun's most important message was that they were going re-invigorate Java on the desktop. We saw today at the morning keynote (and much later at Bob Brewin's afternoon keynote) that they will deliver.

Sun had another ace up its sleeve with the second demonstration. Allow me to digress a little: The Java Champions were asked as a conference call group in November 2007 about Sun's strategy for bringing JavaFX to the market. There was a fair bit of controversy about JavaFX and some champions were sceptical about the move into the RIA market, others, like myself, were lukewarm, optimistic and favourable. I remember telling Sun executives in either voice or email that the JavaFX was dead in the water, if it failed to provide codecs that were able to provide visual media H.264, MPEG4 and of course MP3 audio. We know that codecs are proprietary and expensive to license. Originally, I thought the problem of obtaining a high quality codec would be a stumbling block back in November.

Let me take you back to the second demonstration. The application consisted of a single video media player that was accessing short movie film trailers in High Definition quality. This was the first time that any of us had seen the rumoured Java Media Component API, which was a lightweight rendering layer of (video) media. It is the successor to the failed and abandoned Java Media Framework (JMF).

At the start of the application, a single frame was being animated and toss around the screen in 3D. The demonstrator then cranked up the number of frames very quickly from one frame to two, and then ten frames. We could not believe our eyes. Was this really a Java application rendering video frames without jitter, interference, and mapped into 3D space? The best part of the demo was the mapping of the render video frames on to 3D OpenGL scene graph object. They called this demonstration The Video Ball and rendered they claimed 200 video streams simultaneously in animated planes, rolling into  a football and also mixed the audio said streams. The Java Media Component is going to be biggest important innovation in desktop Java for while. It was simple quite stunning! The audience were whooping. Sun has delivered. Let me repeat what has been written. Sun has delivered. Java is fast; it is not slow.

To cap the codec story, Sun also announced that will license the codec technology from ON2, the same firm that helped to delivery the Flash Video codec. The codec will allow H.264, MPEG4, Windows Media Video for video decoding. There will be also be support for audio in the form of Window Media Audio and MP3. It was not clear if Apple Quicktime or DIVX/XVID formats will be supported.

Sun aims to deliver a JavaFX SDK in July 2008, early adoptors can apply to be included in the preview release program. There was one rub of the green in the JavaFX API and the JMC API are not yet ready for prime time. Delivery is two months out.

• JavaFX Development Tools include a plug-in for NetBeans and, in the future, for Eclipse and other IDEs (Expected Summer 2008)
• JavaFX Designer Authoring Tools:
• JavaFX Media Converter (summer 2008): Tool to export rich media content directly into JavaFX
• JavaFX Designer Authoring Tool (available spring 2008): Tool for visual designers.

You will have probably read that music and rock veteran Neil Young appeared on stage with Jonathan Schwartz at the key note. He was proclaiming the advantages of Java and the Blu-ray API, which finally allowed to him to produce an anthology boxset that he envisioned WAY back in the 1980s. The boxset would be voluminous and consist more than music, but remastering, photos, interviews, stage notes, clips and news articles.

So now on to the conference proper.

TS-5152: Overview of the JavaFX™ Script Programming Language : Chris Oliver

In comparison to last years talk on JavaFX, yours truly was really disappointed with the delivery of the presentation. Although the material and technical notes were good. Chris gave a fair bit information in the background of JavaFX, his previous life as linguist and his appreciation of declarative programming. He also updated us on the language capabilities with binding, bound and non-bound functions, and finally timelines and triggers. Chris could be more animated and less dry when he spoke. Sorry. This performance would not win American Idol not in a million years.

TS-5138: The JavaFX™ Platform: Sexy Interfaces For Mere Mortals : Joshua Smith

The second session of yours truly JavaOne 2008 was, happily to say, much better. This talk was given by Joshua Smith, who is a feature on the openjfx-compiler development mailing list. He has been using JavaFX since May 2007 and produce a set of four demos.

The first one was an impressive matrix demo, with the hieroglyphs dropping down the screen, but he applied a clipping layer, which vanished to the a singularity. It was really very cool. Joshua Smith explained how the timelines and the clipping worked.  In the second demonstration, a background image was clipped by a text message.

Lunchtime General Session

Bob Brewin took the helm of the general session at lunch time. He was talked about the changes inside the Java ecosystem, in particularly demonstrating the GlassFish server v3, NetBeans  6.1, Ruby and Python and of course JavaFX. Two surprises: Stephan Janssen showed off his early access JavaFX implementation of the Parleys.com website. The announcement [press release] of the ON2 agreement and licensing of the codec technology by Sun Microsystem. Parleys.com was chosen as the key application to demonstrate keynote. Along with demonstrating the JavaFX version, Stephan also announced that Parleys.com will now offer free space to both Java and Adobe user groups for posting their content.

Josh Marinacci are demonstrated his application, LiveConnect, again, which was shown in the morning key note. The application is in 3D and loads the photos and message from the social networking friends. He claimed JavaFX has easy access to Java APIs and libraries. He implemented an XMP plug-in for his LiveConnect application. It was pretty decent demonstration.

TS-7372: Case Studies from the JavaFX™ Technology World : Jeff Martin; Raghavan Srinivas; Jo Voordeckers

In this session we were lucky to hear from Jo Voordeckers who built the pre-released version of the Parleys.com with JavaFX. He actually coded a media player with JavaFX with the older Java Media Framework API (JMF). He used the open source Ffmpeg toolkit. FFmpeg is a computer program that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. Jo decided on Ffmpeg, because there was a JMF component already written for it. This is great talk because he explained the issues he encountered with the player. Again he also emphasised the ability built a undockable/dockable Java applet with code changes.

The other talk by Jeff Martin concerned reporting and an application to built management information systems report. It was kind of a much better version of Actuate cross bred with a desktop publisher application, which looked tremendously easy-to-use and was built using JavaFX technology. This demonstration was good but I was not as interested in MIS.

TS-6072: Advanced Enterprise Debugging Techniques: Neal Ford

My first Java EE talk of the conference featured a confident and amusing Neal Ford (He is yet another ThoughtWorker, so why am I not surprised?). He had a some very good tips for enterprise development. Yours truly found the most profound techniques were writing efficient and descriptive logging. Also he suggest insert a monitoring and query Servlet into the production, obviously password and securely protected.

There is an open source framework called Fiddle, which allows an engineer to query the application, database, using an new favourite, Groovy. How many system administrators have become suddenly very worried about a possible back door into production? It is a trade-off between maintenance and security. You chose which the side of the see-saw falls to the ground!

BOF-5504: JUG Community BOF: JUG Leaders from Around the World Interact with Sun: Fabrizio Gianneschi; Frank Greco

This was our meet up with the JUG Leaders. Catch the video on Vimeo asap.

Special Shout Out!

Christopher Marsh Bourdon, Vice President of IB Technology, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Singapore
Glen R. Goodwin, User Experience Technologist, Senior Software Engineer, DDK Techology Group
Jo Voordeckers, Technical Projectleader, Dolmen, Belgium

If missed a shout-out, then make sure you bring a business card to massive community event, and potential networking and prospect, like JavaOne.



This is Peter Pilgrim, in San Francisco for the JavaONE 2008 conference. Out (06/May/2008)




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