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The pros and cons of the new Java

Sun's revelations at JavaOne: many pluses, and a few minuses

By Rich Kadel, JavaWorld.com, 05/01/97

I had been reading about the new APIs, JavaBeans, remote method invocation (RMI), and some of the more recent announcements, but I just didn't get a sense of the real impact of these technologies until I attended the conference. I needed to see some real demos, and get some of the hard-core facts from the actual developers. Of course, I learn the most when I actually try to use the programming tools. But because of current hardware and project constraints, I haven't had the chance to try much of Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1. Another benefit of the "conference approach" to learning is that the presenters (most of them being the original developers of the tools) gave examples of how they expect us to use their tools. I plan to go back through the slides, now at JavaSoft's Web site (see Resources), and cut and paste these examples into my own code.

I'm not going to dive into the details of any of these new tools and technologies too much in this article. There should be plenty of details to read in this issue of JavaWorld, in JavaWorld's JavaOne Today coverage, and from JavaSoft's Web site (see Resources). But I did come away with some general impressions I thought it would be important to share. Not all of them are positive, and you may not agree with all of them, but remember, these are my opinions.

Be a bean-head or just look like one!

First of all, yes, I feel like a true bean head now. Beans, beans, beans! JavaBeans was one of the central themes of JavaOne. (The other was "100% Pure Java", but I'll get to that in a minute.) As I start using Java 1.1, I will now make it a point to develop everything as a bean. This is not hard to do: JavaSoft has made it so transparent that I really don't have to do much of anything for simple objects. But beans are more than just "cool".

JavaBeans appear to be the best way to develop true "objects": objects that can be written to and read from a file, with their implementation code!; distributed objects that can be delivered to other distributed objects anywhere in the world -- or even in space. (NASA had a great demo during Jeff Johnson's keynote!) But, of course, the strength of beans is the ability to "introspect" on beans -- find out what they can do, how they can do it, and tie them together visually. It's clear that non-programmers will be able to "hack" together a variety of powerful applications from some of the many beans that are just now being developed.

JavaSoft and its partners (there were many partners from across the industry) have done a terrific job in the design and implementation of the JavaBeans technology. It's amazing that they finished this first release so far ahead of schedule. I particularly liked the demo of the HTML Renderer bean (a bean that downloads and formats HTML pages, and allows you to point and click to browse to other HTML documents), linked to the timer and button beans. In a few keystrokes, the presenter combined these three beans, linked events from some beans to functions in other beans, and had a working "kiosk-like" application. This application allowed him to do all the browsing he liked, for 30 seconds, and then automatically return to a default page.