Featured White Papers

• Java Web Hosting | DailyRazor.com - Over 10yrs Of Java Web Hosting Exp!

Sponsored Links

Sponsored Links

Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs

The JavaOne grapevine, Part 4

One last look at the technical sessions, Intel and TogetherSoft, and Java's future

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

March 29, 2002 -- The pavilion winds down; teary-eyed Unreal players frag each other one last time; even the security personnel seem a little emotional -- JavaOne is just too good to last. In this last dispatch from the 2002 JavaOne Conference, I wrap up the week by looking at Thursday's events, technical sessions, and BOFs (birds-of-a-feather meetings), and ruminate on Java's future over the next 12 months.

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

The keynotes waned in value as the conference progressed, so I don't have any major announcements from Thursday's speeches. BEA Systems CEO Alfred Chuang expressed his thoughts on the key technologies over the next 12 months: frameworks, security, and enterprise-solution management. To sum up the keynotes as a whole: we heard good announcements about technologies and initiatives that currently impact the Java community, as well as too much hype around mobile devices and Web services.

Technical session notes

In the TS-1647: Monitoring and Managing the Java Platform session, Sun Microsystems Senior Staff Engineer Ron Mann made the right noises about how managing applications should be easy. Along those lines, project EMMA (Easy Monitoring and Management Anywhere) should help Java developers properly manage Java applications.

Later, at TS-1281: Clustered Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Deployment, Scott Crawford, architect at Stratford Technology, explained the clustering differences between BEA Systems WebLogic and IBM WebSphere. By drawing on his experiences from building a large financial services application, Crawford imparted practical anecdotes. It was a good session, but more specific details please.

BOFs

BOF-1662: Developing Usable, Robust GUIs with the NetBeans tool: From Design to Implementation was quite simply a great BOF. I knew the open source Netbeans IDE's UI (user interface) capabilities, but to see someone skilled in the tool rapidly create a Java GUI really opened my eyes. The form creation and editing capabilities are impressive -- well worth evaluating if you're looking for a free rapid application development (RAD) tool.

IBM's Mike Edwards and Intel's Teri Yang presented BOF-2606: Java Technology-Based Applications on Intel Itanium Systems. They delivered good information, and Edwards let some classified performance numbers slip (I won't say anymore, but they look good!) on how Itanium four-way SMPs (symmetric multiprocessing) compare to their IA-32 equivalents.

Vendor report: Intel

I spoke to Intel to assess how Itanium and McKinley will affect Java technology. (Itanium is Intel's first generation 64-bit CPU, to be followed by McKinley). In short: the impact will be awesome, starting first in the J2EE world, then percolating into client-side applications as the Itanium family replaces the Pentium chipset.