Cool Stuff

NetBeans 6.5

NetBeans 6.5 is now available for download at netbeans.org. I have been using the beta and release candidates for some time now, so there should not be too many surprises. The feature I am happiest about right now is that it is possible to configure projects independently. This enables me to push out code conventions in the root pom.xml file for the entire project. Hence there is no excuse for not following the conventions 🙂

Download NetBeans!

JAVA+YOU

Java+You is the theme of JavaOne 2008. No question about it! The feeling I have after day 1 of this year’s JavaOne is that the focus is on the integration with the consumers as well as the developers in all daily-life situations. Rich Green talked a lot about the “Screens of you life” in his keynote today. Whether you read a book, check you bank account statement, chat with friends on you mobile phone or navigate in you car it is all Java… it is the consumer that drives the change…!

This year they even brought Neil Young on the stage to talk about his new interactive blue-ray disc and the way Java technology has enabled him to produce his memorabilia in a format that he feels is what his fans wants – an interactive history of his musical career.

All in all a more or less typical JavaOne day one show. This is my ninth time at JavaOne, so I think I am entitled to say that 🙂

Java+ME

Øredev 2007 – Day 2

Well, I did not win the iPod… But I ended up 5th at the coding challege at the Epsilon booth. Not too bad if you consider the amount of programming expertise present at the conference. The second day of the conference started with an excellent keynote by Joel Spolsky. He talked about what it is that makes some products blue-chip products while other that just as good end up being ordinaray products.

I also heard Andy Hunt talking about how to refactor your wetware, Kevlin Henney talked about the Agility Cube and Jeff Sutherland
presented Project Management with Scrum. The conference ended with a panel debate about the complexity we are facing in modern software development. All in all a great day at the conference.

Øredev 2007 – Day 1

I blogged a short comment every day during JavaOne this summer. These days I am attending the Øredev 2007 Conference and I can not be any less ambitious now, so here we go 🙂

Day 1 opened with a keynote by Andy Hunt that was talking about “How hard can it be?“. It turns out that the answer to this question is that “it is as hard as we make it“.

In one session Rickard Öberg gave a crash course in Qi4j and Context Driven Design. Floyd Marinescu talked about trends and future of enterprise Java™. We got a presentation of JavaFX by Torbjörn Frizon where he coded the presentation viewer on the fly…  Rob Harrop gave an introduction to Spring Batch and Jeff Sutherland talked about The Agile Enterprise.

The afternoon keynote was held by Dan North where he talked about Best Practices or Better “Best” Practices or No Best Practices at all.  He kept his promise to let us out to get our well deserved beer on time 🙂

All in all a great day on the conference that ended with dinner, stand-up comedy and a couple of beers. Tomorrow I plan on winning an iPod in the exhibition hall…!!

JavaOne 2007 Wrap-up

Open Possibilities was the main theme for JavaOne 2007. There is no arguing that with the open-sourcing of Java, the technology is more open than ever. This in turn opens up for more possibilities than ever.

Some of the important things from JavaOne was:
– The completion of the open-sourcing of Java was announced, maybe not too exciting news, but important that it is happening.
– JavaFX, formerly known as F3, was introduced. Sun focuses on winning back the client. There is still a way to go, but only the future will show…
– There is a strong focus on tools with NetBeans and Eclipse as the two major players. Why would anyone pay heaps of money for an IDE when you can get NetBeans or Eclipse for free?

JavaOne 2007 – Day 4

The last day of JavaOne 2007 was no different from the previous days. As always, James Gosling presented an impressive “Toy Show” with everything from Java powered dancing robots and autonomous underwater vehicles and helicopters to monitoring features in NetBeans.

My favorite presentation the last day was Neal Gafter’s presentation of closures in the Java language. It seems that this is something that has to come in one form or the other. Quoting Mark Jason Dominus: ”In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they’ll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion.”

To find out more about closures, look up the following links:
http://www.javac.info/
http://gafter.logspot.com