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The JavaOne grapevine, Part 3

The Concurrency Utilities BOF, IBM and Java, JiniFest, and more

By Humphrey Sheil, JavaWorld.com, 03/28/02

March 28, 2002 -- In my dispatch from day three of the 2002 JavaOne Conference, I report on the technical sessions focusing on the JavaServer Pages (JSP) 1.3 and Servlet 2.4 specifications, the JavaServer Faces (JSF) framework, followed by looks at Portals, Portlets, and Web services. After that, I report on IBM's Java work, revisit the Application Verification Kit (AVK), and wrap with JiniFest, a gathering of Jini enthusiasts.

Read the whole "The JavaOne Grapevine" series:

• Part 1: Daily updates from the 2002 JavaOne Conference floor
• Part 2: JCP changes, Oracle's Java strategy, JavaServer Faces news, and more
• Part 3: The Concurrency Utilities BOF, IBM and Java, JiniFest, and more
• Part 4: One last look at the technical sessions, Intel and TogetherSoft, and Java's future

Keynote news

Wednesday's keynote featured Java strategy reports from SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner and Sprint Senior VP Scott Relf and VP John Yuzdepski. I found Sprint's US 3G services rollout plan interesting, with planned availability for 144 kbps access nationwide in a few months, rolling into approximately 3 Mbps bandwidth by 2004. Bandwidth at that level will put in place the communications infrastructure necessary for mobile devices, Java-enabled or not, to be truly usable.

Technical session notes

Today, I went to many technical sessions, which were mostly good too! Diving right in then:

The TS-1693: An Overview of the Java Servlet 2.4 and JavaServer Pages 1.3 Specifications session gave me the detail I wanted for the next release of these seminal J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) specifications. The mainly evolutionary changes in the Servlet 2.4 specification clarify and enhance listeners, while changes in JSP 1.3 prove more revolutionary, providing an expression language, better page authoring support, and the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL). Both specifications will be available as part of J2EE 1.4, scheduled for the first quarter 2003. I found it interesting that the Servlet team may employ XML Schema, an XML language used to describe and constrain XML documents' content, to define servlet deployment descriptors. Such a move would, I believe, make the Servlet specification the first major JSR (Java Specification Request) to use Schema in this way. If so, surely others will follow.

I also attended the TS-2418: Java TV API Technical Overview session mainly to see what is going on in the digital television space and also to gauge the community's interest level. Judging by the attendance, there's not a whole a lot of action in this area at present. The session itself was good, although I think a live demo, instead of screen snapshots, would have made the examples clearer.

In TS-3469: Portals, Portlets, and Web Services, IBM's Thomas Schaeck gave a good overview of the Portlets JSR's direction, influenced as it is by the IBM WebSphere Portal Server and the Jakarta Project's Jetspeed implementation. A portlet is a specialized servlet that is aware of a portal context; it knows not to use the whole screen. Schaeck also offered a different take on the usual Java-centric Web service client by showing the Web services integration piece using an ActiveX control, embedded in a Microsoft Word document -- cool.