JavaOne Day 4 - The Toy Show

The Friday morning general session is something to look forward to atevery JavaOne, and this year was no exception. The reason is becauseJames Gosling runs it, and he brings up people to show some of theneatest uses of Java technology you’ve ever heard of; and this year’s“Toy Show” was no exception.

This year’s show was a bitdifferent because it combined the traditional Toy Show with the Duke’sChoice Awards. Integrating the two meant that it wasn’t as fast-paced,with one awesome gizmo or software demo after another, but it alsomeant that the Duke’s Choice Award winners got a bigger audience thanthey might have and developers got a look at some things they mighthave otherwise missed out on.

Ari Zilka, representingTerracotta, accepted the first Duke’s Choice Award for their work inmaking it simpler to scale Java applications.

BrendanHumphreys, of Atlassian, accepted the next award for Clover, a testingtool that many Java developers use to check code coverage as part oftheir continuous integration process. The new version also allows youto run just the tests for the areas affected by the code change thattriggered the build.

The BlueJ/Greenfoot team, represented byIan Utting and Paul Henriksen, was brought on stage and James wishedthem a happy birthday. For ten years BlueJ has been used to teach Javaprogramming to children (and adults) in universities and schools aroundthe globe.

Mark Gerhard, CEO of Jagex the makers of RuneScape,brought a fast motion video showing how they create and test creaturesfor RuneScape. It turns out that Jagex has written their own version ofMaya of Max3D in Java to allow them to model, and test, and deploy thecreatures and other content for RuneScape.

Simon Ritter andAngela Caceido, both Technology Evangalists with Sun, gave us a goodlook at what you can do with Java/JavaFX, a Wii remote, some wood, anda helping of innovative thinking. Go watch the video on this.Especially Angela’s simplified version of the UI from the movie“Minority Report” - it’ll leave you with the desire to go out and buildone yourself.

Tor Norbye, Principal Engineer with Sun andmember of the Java Posse, gave us a better look at the JavaFX Authoringtool. While it’s not yet in beta, I was impressed with the capabilitiesTor displayed and how easy it makes creating a UI using JavaFX. You caneven pull up multiple views (representing what the screen will looklike on different devices) and tweak them individually to deal withdifferent screen sizes your application will encounter. If you’reinterested in JavaFX development, I recommend keeping an eye out forthe release of this tool.

Brad Miller, Associate Director ofthe Robotics Resource Center at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute,and Derek White, Staff Engineer at Sun, accepted the next Duke’s ChoiceAward for his work on the FIRST Robotics Competition. Brad broughtmembers of the winning team and their robot to demonstrate a little ofwhat FIRST is about, and Derek showed the robot being controlled byJava code executing on his laptop in the NetBeans debugger. Previously,the controlling code was written in C/C++ but this year the code’s beenported to Java and anybody interested in helping kids learn Java isencouraged to get involved. Check out www.usforst.org for more details.

There’s a lot more that went on, including a look at Visuvi’svisual search engine, Manuel Tijerino’s jukebox for startup bands, andNeil Young’s entry in the Automotive X prize competition - a 6,000pound 1959 Lincoln Continental that runs on electricity. Go check outthe video at http://java.sun.com/javaone/2009/general_sessions.jsp

Burk Hufnagel, reporting for DZone