Ajaxular - All Things AJAX

After CommunityOne and the initial rush to JavaOne on Tuesday, Wednesday for me was a bit less eventful. The highlights of the day included Neal Gafter's talk on Closures and Gavin King's introduction to Web Beans. For those who have already been following the Closures proposals (and debates) for the Java language, Neal's talk didn't really contain much that was new other than concrete examples for how closures would be used in the real world (hence the title "Closures Cookbook"). Gavin's presentation was a little more interesting for me, primarily because I had not really spent that much time looking at Web Beans. Web Beans, for those who don't know, is a component model for objects in the web tier. It borrows ideas from Seam and Guice and, well, standardizes them. This has been an increasing trend in Java, and a good one: take the best of the ideas from Open Source, and move them into the standards space. But with all the new specifications being aimed at developers in this space (EJB 3.0, JSF 2.0, Servlet 3.0, etc.), I wondered a bit if there wasn't just a little specification overload happening here.

By Thursday, most attendees are starting to feel what is commonly referred to (in professional circles) as "PowerPoint fatigue". I was no exception. One session that really alleviated some of the fatigue was Martin Odersky's "Programming with Functional Objects in Scala". For those who don't know, Scala is a new programming langauge created by Odersky himself. Though it targets the JVM, it is a very different language than Java: functions/methods are objects which can be overridden (!); the language uses mixins ("traits") instead of interfaces; it is statically type-inferred; and the list goes on. The slide where Odersky showed Erlang-like actors in Scala really floored me; clearly, this was a sophisticated language.

The other fatigue reliever, "The Future of Guice", contained almost no information but was the perfect counterpoint to the rest of the conference. Bob Lee and fellow cohorts from Google (including Joshua Bloch himself, who showed up for the presentation) provided free beer, free books, off-the-cuff jokes, and generally a good time. I still have very little idea of what Guice 2.0 will be like but--what the heck--I'll read the documentation when it comes out.

As in past years, Friday is the winding-down period of the conference. The show floor is already empty, and a lot of people are thinking about other things. Nevertheless, the intrepid contention-goer can still squeeze some last nuggets of wisdom before the end, and this year I was able to do exactly that. My most practical session of the entire conference was on this day, "Automated Heap Dump Analysis" by Andreas Buchen and Krum Tsvetkov from SAP. I've spent some time doing profiling with one of the best (JProbe), but I must admit this was a pretty slick tool. For those who are interested, the SAP Memory Analyzer is open source and freely downloadable.

I ended the conference with Rod Johnson's "Spring Framework 2.5: New and Notable". Rod spent a fair amount of time on both the new @AutoWire dependency injection annotation as well as the OSGi-enablement of Spring itself. For those who have been following Guice, the first was nice but no big deal. The second (the integration of OSGi into Spring) was much more interesting given the move of many big application server vendors--WebLogic, WebSphere, Glassfish, etc.--to OSGi as the modularization and versioning platform of choice.

And, just like that, JavaOne was over. I rode up the escalator in the Moscone Center with a slight tear in my eye and a fistful of receipts for my expense report. Well, here's to next year...

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