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JavaOne complete: From day zero to day's end, plus one

Here's a look at JavaSoft's recent JavaOne conference, with coverage including the learning opportunities available from the Tuesday before the show to the Saturday after

By John Zukowski, JavaWorld.com, 05/01/97

Having missed the first JavaOne, I arrived at this year's show with high hopes of learning about the latest from JavaSoft. During JavaOne '96, I had gone through the online slides and learned much from the many advanced tutorials. With three technical tracks at JavaOne '97, I was sure there would be many more technical offerings. Although there was much of interest to the technical developer this year, if you actually wanted to see some code, you were practically left in the dark. Fortunately, there was enough to hold my interest -- and enough announcements to keep me wondering what's left that doesn't yet have an official API. In this article, I'll highlight the pieces of information that interested me the most, and which should change developers lives the most.

April Fools!: The pre-show events

If you made it into San Francisco early, Tuesday, April 1, provided a handful of technical previews to get you warmed up for the big show. First, MageLang Institute provided a full-day session of "Java for the Experienced Programmer." Although not hands-on, about 150 people showed up to get a feel for what the rest of the week had in store, with plenty of details and examples on the latest features of Java 1.1.

I snuck out of the tutorial early to head over to the Java User Group session. Having founded one such group myself, I was curious about what Sun had to say. Here, JavaSoft re-committed its efforts to the user group community, and Marimba, EarthWeb, and others -- including JavaWorld editor-in-chief Michael O'Connell -- provided short presentations. If you haven't heard of Marimba's Castanet, get ready for it, as the next wave of browsers will include support for this self-updating, caching, software-distribution system. Also, EarthWeb had something to say about the restructuring of its Java directory, Gamelan, into Developer.Com and later announced its purchase of JARS, the Java Applet Rating Service. If you still didn't have enough of Java for the day, in about three hours Sun Educational Services finished the day off with a whirlwind overview of everything Java.

On with the show: The announcements that packed a punch

Throughout the conference there was an onslaught of press releases and lots of informative sessions. Although all interesting, the ones that should have the greatest effect on the development community include announcements of Java Foundation Classes, Enterprise JavaBeans, and a new Sound API.

Java Foundation Classes
The Java Foundation Classes (JFCs) are a new framework for GUI application development. Taking Netscape's Internet Foundation Classes (IFCs), Java's Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), and some development support from IBM, the three are going to work together to provide a richer component set with the next release of the Java Development Kit (JDK). According to Netscape's IFC Developer Central, JFC will include a robust set of customizable, lightweight UI components, rich text support, and more. A preview release of JFC should be available in the second quarter of this year, with the first release shipped by the end of the year. Where this leaves the Java Management API (JMAPI), Admin View Module (AVM) components, and Microsoft's Application Framework Classes (AFC) is yet to be seen, as there is definite overlap between the three.

 

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