Apparently the big announcement for this keynote is the GPL’d JavaFX Script, and the associated pay-for OEM targetted JavaFX Mobile.
It targets more than just the current Java developer community, has tools, works on desktop or mobile device etc. Sounds much like the JSF promises, though in reality looks more like what Rebol have been pushing for years (according to infoq it’s something they bought from SavaJe).
So the big question from Apache’s point of view with regard to JavaOne is whether we’re being listened to concerning the inability to properly license Harmony as Java(tm). Geir guessed right with his first guess, as far as I can interpret the statement was that they would sort out the TCK for open source Java (in the context of OpenJDK) via a series of steps etc etc usw usw.
I don’t think that Rich Green announced anything about it being open source per se, just that it would be useable by open source. Not that he defined whether ‘open source’ is Sun’s projects or the community.
Flight to JavaOne went well. Whisked through security, read Forty Signs of Rain and played Football Manager 2006, and then gambled on the BART train from the airport to San Francisco and comfortably found the hotel - though having “The Westin St Francis” a block before “The Sir Francis Drake” is confusing for the tired traveller. Fortunately my gut told me to continue.
Interesting problems at the hotel - burst pipes had wiped out my room so I was given a larger room on another floor. Only catch? No bed, instead they’d set up a sofa bed. Either it’s half of a larger room still, or it’s a meeting room. Impressively large for a hotel room, we lived in a smaller place for a month when we got to Seattle.
No wifi in the room - or rather many options but none of them work and none look like they belong to the hotel. Nice bath - then time to think about bed as my neighbours get back and start what I hope won’t be an N hour chat on their balcony. It’s sounding like it’s going to be one of those though.
The sofa bed didn’t look very attractive, so I pulled the mattress off onto the floor and took up camp there. Much more comfortable. In fact, better than the beds usually are. Oddly noisy bathroom is going to irritate, along with said neighbours. However - it’s all an adventure.
Rich Green is talking bollocks about paying open source developers.
The article also says: “The current scenario is Robin Hood backwards: stealing from the poor and making others rich, said Green. He stressed that Sun, however, is the number-one contributor to open source worldwide.”
From BBC Sports:
NEWCASTLE'S LAST FIVE BOSSES Glenn Roeder 2006-2007 Graeme Souness 2004-2006 Sir Bobby Robson 1999-2004 Ruud Gullit 1998-1999 Kenny Dalglish 1997-1998
Ignoring Roeder, the other four were proven managers at other big clubs. One has to wonder if maybe there’s something else missing at Newcastle.
Back to the work this week and getting back in the habit. I started work on a branched version of Lang that aims to be Java 5 specific and throws away the deprecations and pre-Java 5 style classes. It’s an interesting bit of experimentation [LangTwo-1.x ] and has been fun so far.
I got back up to speed on Quartz and working on Quartz 1.6.1. There are 22 open issues and 26 that have been resolved - so we’re passed the halfway point. Looking back, my first ever blog entry a little under five years ago was on Quartz, so it’s very satisfying to be committing to Quartz. The 1.6.1 release is all about tortoise development, slowly plodding through the issues and getting them checked off before realizing on some future happy day that it’s time to consider a release.
Of course work stuff happens too. We’re at fifty-eight backports in SASH 2.0 and I tweaked the meta-build system such that rather than trying to use the upstream project builds for javadoc, we now just identify where the source is and our system takes care of javadoc and source jar building. This means we can then put said jars into our Maven repository; previously src and javadoc were at the project level and not the artifact level - which sucks if a project produces multiple artifacts.
I did a little JIRA hacking - but nothing major. I’m working on a portlet to do with voting, but it’s still in the prototype phase and I didn’t get much further with it. I did knock out a portlet to show random issues from a filter, but it’s not quite what the JIRA wishlist page was asking for and I’m unsure on how to get what that request wanted. Cool though because it’s involved discussion on the jira-dev mailing list rather than just hacking privately.
Lastly - I’m off to JavaOne next week for the first time. Irritating as it probably is to many, I’ve enjoyed the JavaOne Schedule Builder software. It’s slow and not the best visualization, but thinking on my schedule in advance has been good and I can see how that allows the conference to better juggle their resources. My only clash was in choosing between a few hours using Project Darkstar to work on a MUD, or going to a BOF about the new Java Time API. I’ve opted for the latter because I strongly suspect said MUD is going to suck in comparison to an LPMUD (most importantly, I suspect it won’t be modifiable at runtime but will involve the lame option of working on a turned off version of the MUD).
I fly in on Monday night (I always forget that I can use the day to travel) and out again on Friday night. I’m not looking forward to being away from the family, but I am looking forward to a host of interesting sessions and to meeting people for the first and nth times.
