Sunday, May 11, 2008

Java One 2008, day four, part one

Started the day with the always impression Gossiling demo-on-keynote. As every he is a joy to watch and always brings some really interesting projects to the stage.

First up was the visual vm which is best decribed as a lightweight vm profiling and debugging tool. It can connect to any running VM, although it has more features on JDK 6. I like the ability to dump all stack and indeed dump the heap for an already running process without the need to know in advance of starting the debugger. Can be extended too for things like service monitoring, can see this would be a very valuable tool to have in the box.

Next was the javascript support in netbeans that did some very cool type inferance, which is no mean trick with a weakly type languages like javascript. Only support debugging in Firefox, I am pretty sure JDeveloper does IE aswell. (Go go JDeveloper)

The next topic was game development, covering DarkStar and JMonkeyEngine which are server and client engines repectively. Very interesing to see just how good 3D games are in Java these days, specially with a MMO engine like DarkStar.

The presentation ended up with bits on CERN and JMars. CERN uses Java to run just about everything and NASA has most of there visualization software for mars project in java. Used everyday to find landing sites.

Sentilla also did bit; but it wasn't that impressive. Still I have there dev kit now I wonder how far I will get with it.

First presentation of the day was TS-5796 JavaFX Pattern but that will have to wait for another day, time to think about getting on the plane...

No comments: