JavaOne: Day 1 Keynote Recap

Yesterday kicked off JavaOne proper with the Java Keynote. It started off as an astoundingly dull round of back-pats/sales-pitches from Sun to some of their corporate sponsors. Things got momentarily exciting when Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) announced that JDK7 was out now, but it turns out that JDK7 itself wasn’t released — just another milestone (more at InfoQ).

JavaFx really drove the day technically, although while we saw it on a desktop and on a BluRay disk and heard about it on a mobile phone, it was never in a browser — Tor Norbye of the Java Posse, who worked on one of the JavaFx products that were displayed, explained to me later that technical difficulties with the presenter’s monitor had obscured part of the demo where it started in the browser¹, though, so maybe that isn’t the big deal it seemed to be.

¹ Oracle/Sun would do well to note that the guy who fixed the technical problem got more applause than any of the drive-by demos.

Other interesting news was Verizon: they came out and announced that they would offer low-level network services exposed via Java APIs, so things like whether or not someone is present on the network can be integrated into applications. I’ve been waiting for something like this to come out, and I’m excited to see that it wasn’t Apple/AT&T doing it: this is the kind of functionality that might pull side-job, innovative developers off the iPhone.

The last piece of news is that Larry Ellison came out to discuss the Oracle acquisition of Sun. He mainly squashed the craziest of the crazy talk (that Oracle would kill Java), and had a clever phrase where he talked about OpenOffice getting a JavaFx front-end, thereby effectively announcing that OpenOffice and JavaFx would continue on in the future — those were two projects that I suspected were going to get the ax, since neither is making money and they both are in a weird business space for Oracle. Aside from that, he didn’t say much. He did look profoundly uncomfortable when talk of combining Oracle and Sun R&D budgets came out: Sun’s R&D budget is proportionally extremely high, and probably a major reason for its financial difficulties. While I love the stuff that comes out of Sun R&D, I have trouble seeing someone as fiscally-minded as Larry Ellison tolerating a gushing financial wound for long.

Oh yeah — and Java now has an app store. But it’s only in beta for customers, and there’s no way to actually sell things on it. And it’s not clear at all if it will integrate with/replace the Android Market, Verizon Tools and Apps, or Blackberry App World. But if you get into the beta, you can install Runescape and Gosling’s own Solitare implementation!