Visit of Devoxx 2009

Usually when I come to JavaPolis/Devoxx I'm always trying to learn about the new technologies and the trends of the year to come. And in order to learn something new I attend an occasional session of topics I've only heard about.

This year I was decided to attend everything I could about JavaFX and the current state of JDK7. And of course to attend the JavaPosse session !!!! :-)

JavaFX

The different sessions were mainly about the language. But some were awesome : Gaming JavaFX on Friday. Using the phys2d library to make explosions, shooting cannon balls and others and see the pieces flying around. In a BOF session we (tried to) program a game.

See the FX Experience Blog for details.

Last but not least : Previews of the RAD and authoring tool. The former is a drag & drop wysiwyg tool to create JavaFX applications with the regular controls (new have been added !). The latter is an impressive tool to create animations. The RAD tool is to be released with Netbeans 6.8. According to the schedule that should be the 10th of December.

The graphics layer will be replaced with PRISM. Faster than anything we know.

JavaFX will hit like a bomb !!! If only they could making it start up faster ...

JDK7 / Java 7

Having followed the debates about the next JDK on the JavaPosse podcast I was very eager to hear about the current state from the original authors. And also to hear whether they've solved the modularization issues that promise to make Java (and thus also JavaFX) smaller and faster. So it can compete with the low installation and startup time of other RIA technologies. If JDK7 doesn't deliver, JavaFX is probably going to remain a second-ranking technology.

There's also the closures debate - will they be implemented or not ?

And what about Coin ? What will they be able to contribute ?

Apparently at Sun they went through the pain of dividing the Java runtime into logical parts with their dependencies and refactor accordingly. The good news is that this is work in progress. The bad news is that the release has been delayed. Which is not so good news for JavaFX either. Without a full modularized JDK, we're still imposing JavaFX users a relatively long download and startup. Whatever cool features and tools we'll have. I hope Sun can do a JDK7 release with only modules for example. Kind of a backported JDK6.

Project Jigsaw is all about dividing the runtime into modules and provide developers with means to create modules on their own. And killing the classpath because it is way too inefficient.

Reinier took the time to write out notes about the Jigsaw session.

As of last week there should be a prototype for Jigsaw, but only functional on Ubuntu. I still have to try this.

See the JDK7 features for details.

TBC...