JavaOne: The power of Java and open source
Chief Researcher John Gage officially opened JavaOne 2006 today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. He indicated there are 188 sessions currently scheduled between now and Friday. His advice, "Always carry a pen" to make last minute additions to your schedule.
There were many, many speakers but here are the highlights:
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of Sun Microsystems, Inc.:
"The Java community has never been more vibrant than it is today.".
Ed Zander, the Chairman and CEO of Motorola:
"We're doing over 200 million a year, and the industry will ship will close to a billion. We're moving almost as fast as we can to a Java and java/Linux platform. We want Java to stay unified so developers write once, we want to move on security and DRM, and get the applications ported now."
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder and CEO of Canonical Inc.:
"As of today, because of substantial changes your team has made, we can make Java available. Java will be directly accessible to Unbutu, Debian, and other users."
Marc Fluery, CEO of JBoss:
"We're announcing that we're joining the Netbeans project, and we're looking forward to this relationship."
Rich Green, EVP, Sun Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
(when asked if he was going to open source Java):
"It's not a question of whether, it's a question of how. So we'll go do this."
Jeff Jackson, Senior Vice President, Java enterprise Platforms and Developer Products.:
"I'd like to thank all the members of all the expert groups. It's been a privledge to guide the Java platform for SE ande EE for these past 10 years. One thing I have to comment on is naming of these releases. Merlin Tiger Mustang Dophin Glassfish. It was a little bit like being stuck in "Ace Ventura Pet Detective"."
Jeff and many other Sun developers gave demos of Ease of Development, Web 2.0 Support, .NET Interoperability, and Simplified SOA. For .NET Interoperability (project Tango), Kiril Gavrylyuk from Microsoft came up on stage and danced a tango with Sun employees, then demonstrated a .NET application accessing Java services.
Jeff announced several new open source contributions including:
- Web services interoperability technology (WSIT), available today
- BPEL Engine into Open ESB today,
- Sun Java System Portal Server soon (over time, piece by piece).
- A new name, "Open Java EE"
Richard Bair and Romain Guy, Swing engineers at Sun, demonstrated a "S"Mashup, a Swing application that combines Swing and Web2.0 technologies.
After the keynote I went to a Q&A session with Sun executives and members of the press. This is where having that Press pass really came in handy. Of course the subject of open source Java dominated. Some highlights:
Q: How can sun make money with open source Java?
Jonathan: Open source is not anti-business, it's pro market.
Q: Will Sun allow others to ship rt.jar with their own VM's?
Jeff: We're considering it. I might. It's a complex question.
Q: Will you talk to Eclipse about reducing the divergence between NetBeans and Eclipse?
Rich: We're open to it. With that as the sole focus, i'll have those discussions at any time. But to the extent that there are activities that allow developers to go into an area where compatibility is at risk that would be a probelem.
Jonathan: Substitution is the very foundation of Competition.