These are some of the blogs that cover JavaOne 2012:

Dustin Marx’s blog

On his “Inspired by Actual Events” blog Dustin Marx writes very comprehensive and detailed session summaries and about his general conference experience in his JavaOne 2012 blog postings. Some of his articles can also be found at JavaLobby.

Here some links to postings from Dustin’s blog about sessions that I also attended:

• JavaOne Technical Keynote
• Java Strategy Keynote and IBM Keynote
• Java Community Keynote
• The Road to Lambda
• Getting Started with the NetBeans Platform
• From Instants to Eras, the Future of Java
• Introduction to Ceylon

And some that I did not attend but find interesting:

• NetBeans – Project Easel
• NetBeans.Next – The Roadmap Ahead
• Looking into the JVM Crystal Ball
• JavaFX on Smart Embedded Devices
• Scala Tricks
• 101 Ways to Improve Java – Why Developer Participation Matters

Other blogs

• Oracle’s JavaOne blog
• Glassfish blog
• Joe Darcy, Oracle
• Geertjan Wielenga, Netbeans

On Sunday, the Technical keynote complemented the Java Strategy keynotes and showed highlights of upcoming Java features.

Please note: A full-length video of the keynote is available on the JavaOne 2012 channel of the Oracle Media Network. Shorter, heavily cut “teaser” video clips of all JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld keynotes can be found on the Video on demand page of the JavaOne website.

JSE and JavaFX

Mark Reinhold guided the audience through this keynote, following an interview-like style where he and several Oracle software engineers walked the audience presented a JavaFX application and how some JDK 8 features would improve its code.

The JavaFX team showed a Schedule Builder app on Win OSX, Ubuntu Linux and a small Linux ARM based system (Raspberry Pi, using JSE Embedded).

The app was a Schedule Builder for JavaOne attendees for session search and selection into an individual conference schedule

They showed how to quickly design JavaFX pages using SceneBuilder within Netbeans 7.2: Convenient drag and drop, CSS styling. Example was the Login page.

The code for processing list items in the app was shown as quite verbose and clunky. Brian Goetz came on stage and explained how Java 8 will bring Lambda expressions and new methods on collections like forEach() and removeIf() that vastly simplify the code and can replace for (X x : xList) { .. } style loops.

Then Mark Reinhold demonstrated an early version of a modularized JSE to run the Schedule Builder app on a minimal set of JRE modules (subset of headless). On a Raspberry Pi he used jmod command to load the required modules interactively and run the app as a module.

JEE 7 features and tooling

Arun Gupta hosted this part of the keynote and presented some new features of JEE 7 with code examples: REST client API, full-duplex WebSocket API with annotation support on POJOs, support for convenient processing of JSON.

He also showed much reduced code verbosity in JMS 2.0: Sending a message programatically is a one liner, instead of 18 lines of boiler plate in JMS 1.1.

Other improved areas of JEE 7 like JPA 2.1, EJB 3.2, JAX-RS, were also mentioned but not shown on a code level.

Speakers from Project Avatar showed an app using the developer ease of use for HTML5 features like WebSockets, JSON, Server Sent events, etc.

Features of Project Easel were shown in NetBeans 7.3 beta, including live editing and debugging in Netbeans integrated with Chrome. Netbeans supports this within a new HTML5 project type. It was also mentioned that it uses Nashorn for its JavaScript editor.

A more complete summary of the Technical keynote can also be found here.

During the conference I had daily conference calls and web meetings (using desktop sharing) with colleagues at CGI to report back what I had learned and to get feedback for the selection and preparation of Lunch & Learn sessions once I am back in the office.

Please note: These conference calls were not meant to be polished presentations but rather a timely window into my conference experience and some of the “raw knowledge” I had gathered.

All sessions were recorded but the sound quality is not always great and due to a technical deficiency of the recording software there is sometimes a lag between the video and audio part:

• Day 1 – Oracle Java Keynotes
• Day 2 – Upcoming JSE and JEE features
• Day 3 – Java modularization, new Date/Time API, JRuby implementation history (actual meeting starts at about 20 min)

Please note: A full-length video of the keynotes is available on the JavaOne 2012 channel of the Oracle Media Network. Shorter, heavily cut “teaser” video clips of all JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld keynotes can be found on the Video on demand page of the JavaOne website.

The keynote is also covered in detail on the official JavaOne blog.

Today, Sunday the 30th, the Java Strategy Keynotes were the main opening event of the conference. The speakers were these senior Oracle representatives:

• Hasan Rizvi, Senior VP of Product Development: High-Level Java Strategy
• Georges Saab, VP Software Development: Java Progress and Status update
• Nandini Ramani, VP: JavaFX and Embedded Overview
• Cameron Purdy, VP Development: JEE Status and updates

Oracle will also make all keynotes available as on-demand videos (check the “JavaOne” section on that page).

Make the future Java

The slogan of JavaOne 2012 is “Make the future Java” and Oracle’s overall strategy seems to be a continued effort to move Java forward on all levels:

• Java the language and platform (JSE, via OpenJDK)
• Rich clients (JavaFX, HTML5, JEE: Websockets, JSON, improved JAX-RS)
• Mobile and Embedded (JME, JME-E, JSE-E, JavaCard)
• App Servers, Middleware (JEE7, via Glassfish community)
• Developer Tools (mostly via Netbeans)

Status and Announcements

The keynotes consisted mainly of status summaries illustrating progress that has been made over the last year and release or project announcements by Oracle and invited partners.

Java Standard Edition (JSE)

• New Oracle supported platforms in 2012: OS X, Linux ARM
• Java 7 replacing Java 6 on cloud servers (80% vs 20%)
• More than 200 million downloads of current Java 7, update 7
• OpenJDK: 68 new contributors
• A lot of activity and momentum in various OpenJDK projects
• New features are available in early access releases of Java 8

Featured project:

Phil Rogers, AMD, announced a contribution to Project Sumatra that will bring Heterogenous Systems Architecture (HSA) support to the JVM to enable parallel code execution on CPU and GPU.

Rich clients (JavaFX, HTML5)

Oracle continues to advance JavaFX as its strategic technology for modern UIs. In the long run it is meant to replace Swing. At the same time tool support for HTML5 is improved significantly.

• JavaFX 2.2 for Java 7 is available for Windows, OS X and Linux
• JavaFX 2.2 is co-bundled with the latest Java 7 JDKs
• Project OpenJFX started
• JavaFX to be completely open sourced by end of 2012
• JavaFX Scene Builder 1.1 is now available for Windows, OS X, Linux
• Upcoming NetBeans 7.2 will include integrated SceneBuilder</li
• JavaFX 2.2 comes with support for Swing, SWT and HTML5 integration
• Project Easel brings improved HTML5, JavaScript and CSS support to Netbeans

Featured Product:

Navis and Canoo use JavaFX for the visualization of container terminals. Canoo’s Project Dolphin provides a JEE server + JavaFX client architecture, now available as Open Source at github.

Mobile and Embedded Java

Oracle sees “The Internet of things” as an important 3rd stage of the internet (after internet of computers and people) and therefore targets all ranges of embedded and M2M (“machine to machine”) devices with Java Technology:

• JavaCard technology
• JME Embedded, JME Embedded Client aka OJEC (Linux/ARM, Linux/MIPS)
• JSE Embedded
• Java Embedded Suite 7.0 (JSE-E, minimal Glassfish, REST, Java DB)

Roadmap:

• JME will become a proper subset of JSE
• JME and JSE releases will occur at the same time

Featured products:

• The Royal Canadian Mint presented “MintChip“, a digital currency solution that uses USB sticks based on JavaCard technology.
• Axel Hansmann, Cinterion, announced the world’s smallest M2M module, running JME Embedded, as a breakthrough in the M2M market place.

Java Enterprise Edition (JEE)

JEE 6 is now widely supported and in use (14 implementations have passed the TCK).

JEE 7 builds further on the principles of Developer Productivity (convention over configuration, less boiler-plate code, more modular, e.g. using annotations and resource injection. Another goal is portability across vendors and “across clouds”.

JEE 7 is planned to be released in April 2013, with Glassfish 4.x as the reference implementation. Some stats about current JEE 7 efforts:

• 33+ specs
• 14 active JSRs
• 19 Spec Leads
• 32 companies contributing
• 23 projects on java.net

Some JEE 7 highlights:

• WebSockets API
• Servlet 3.1 NIO
• Server Sent Event
• JSON API
• JAX-RS 2.0
• JMS 2.0

Based on general agreement of various JSR stakeholders some technologies have not been standardized, because they are not yet mature enough or don’t have clear enough common denominators:

• The “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) aspect of JEE
• NoSQL storage APIs (although experimental support for MongoDB and Oracle NoSQL exists in EclipseLink)

Featured Product:

Nike’s FuelBand gadget (“Life is a Sport: Make It Count”) and service uses JEE on the server side for the tracking of physical activity data to feed into a “motivational web and mobile experience”.

Here is my JavaOne 2012 schedule as a PDF file.

Tomorrow is the first day of JavaOne 2012. I have put the finishing touches on my schedule and share it now as a public Google Calendar (iCal URL). Use the URL to add this as a “shared calendar” in Outlook or other calendar apps.

I will attend JavaOne in San Francisco this year.

After the conference tracks were outlined a while ago, the JavaOne Content Catalog is now available and has information about individual sessions, demos, labs, user groups, exhibitors and more.

Oracle announced this on their JavaOne blog earlier this month (June 2012).