JavaOne 2009 – Day 1

The show has started!

As usual Jonathan Swartz presented a collection of partners and companies that has excelled in using or contributing to the Java technology, a couple of Duke awards was announced. The Java Store store.java.com was released with the slogan Turning Labors of Love Into Day Jobs.

James Gosling rocketed out the inevitable T-shirts, and people where as crazy as ever. I am sure some of the nerds even fainted…. 🙂

At the end of the show, Scott McNeally brougt Larry Ellison on stage. See previous post.

Larry on stage

Just when we were wondering if the whole keynote would go by without anybody mentioning Oracle at all, Scott McNealy invited Larry Ellison on stage!

Larry said that Oracle has no plans of changing anything radically. On the contrary, he emphasized that the combined resources of Sun and Oracle will let Java and the Java Community continue to grow as it is doing today.

The show is about to start

My last chance to get a post out in May…
This week, thousands of Java nerds gather in the Moscone Center, San Francisco for the JavaOne Conference. First out is Community One West which takes place on Monday. Then the big opening of JavaOne happens on Tuesday morning. I have the best intentions to write a little bit from it here every day as I have done the previous years.

NetBeans 6.7 beta

After having used NetBeans 6.7 Milestones for a while, I was very happy when the beta was released yesterday. I immediately installed it and started trying it out. The milestones had a tendency to use a LOT of cpu, but so far I have not experienced this with the beta. Maybe since I was stuck up in meetings yesterday and did not have time to code. Today will be better 🙂

Some Highlights

  • Connected Developer (Kenai)

    Create Kenai-hosted projects from within the NetBeans IDE
    Locate and open sources for Kenai-hosted projects in the IDE
    Full integration with Bugzilla

  • Maven

    Support for Web Services creation and consumption and J2EE
    POM Editor and Navigator enhancements

  • PHP

    Code coverage and Selenium support
    PHPUnit output improvements

  • C/C++

    Support of popular Qt library and tools

  • Groovy and Grails

    Out-of-the-box support for Grails 1.1

  • Profiler

    Enhanced Self Diagnosis (“Profile Me Now!”)

  • Java ME / Mobility

    Full support for SVG Rich Components in the Visual Mobile Designer

Kenai

Kenai is Sun’s connected developer destination. It is a integrated suite of developer services where you can host your open source projects. Currently the following features are supported:

  • Source Code Management (Subversion, Mercurial, and Git)
  • Issue Tracking (Jira and Bugzilla)
  • Wiki
  • Forums
  • Mailing Lists
  • Download facility for documents
  • Evolving integration with NetBeans

When you create an account at Kenai, you can host up to five projects for free. I imported two of my hobby projects to try it out, and I liked it. See wikipedia for a comparison of open source software hosting facilities.

Sun+Oracle

This week, it became clear that Oracle buys Sun. Personally, I think this is much better deal than if the IBM-deal had gone through. Just by looking at the corporate culture, it must be a hell of a lot easier to merge Oracle and Sun than trying to squeeze the laid-back-California-minds of Sun into the business suits of The Big Blue.

Oracle has a great history of software acquisitions and Java is so important for Oracle that it is probably in the best of hands.

Java 7

Will there be a Java 7? Will IBM’s potential acquisition of Sun affect Java? It most certainly will, but how? Will there be a JDK 7 and no Java 7? Follow the discussion at TheServerSide.

JUnitMax

Kent Beck has released JUnitMax.

“JUnit Max is an Eclipse plug-in that helps programmers stay focused on coding by running tests intelligently and reporting results unobtrusively. Every time you save a Java file, Max will run your tests and report errors like compile errors. In addition, Max runs the tests most likely to fail first, so you only have to pay close attention to test results for a second (literally) before getting back to coding, even if you have a long-running test suite.”

Running tests in the background is nothing new. A continuous testing plugin for Eclipse has existed for a while. What is new here is the logic deciding in which order the tests should run. But I am not sure people are willing to pay $2/month for it. There are too many free tools out there… I will be waiting for the NetBeans plugin before i give it a try anyway…

Agile Architect

Most agile methodologies does not mention anything about the role of the architect. The team is supposed to be self-managed and take care of everything, including architecture.

“Big Design Upfront is to be avoided at all costs!”

But what about technical debt? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had the big picture? Someone who knows the key technologies and standards to use and makes sure that central mechanisms such as error handling are handled conformly?

This has always been some of the focus areas of a software architect. But how does an agile architect differ from a “traditional” one?

In my view, the traditional, high-tower, ivory architect is long dead anyway, so the role of an agile architect is just the same as that of any architect independent of what kind of development methodology that is being used – agile or not.  You have to be pragmatic, know the technologies used, be able to communicate through code with developers (no-one likes PowerPoint anyway…) as well as being close to the business stakeholders.