Sun London Tech Days' Reflections

The Sun London Tech Days conference underway this week is deviating slightly from Sun Tech days I've attended in the past. Most striking for me is that amongst the traditional mix of acronyms starting with J are sparse but consistent references to Ruby. A turn around perhaps from a year or two ago when Sun, along with other corporations, appeared to take a dismissive approach towards dynamically typed languages. Another new addition to the format was an "un-conference" session for people from the audience to self-select topics to present to the rest. Unfortunately this session had to compete with the end of day drinks reception, a very hard one to beat.

It was great to see James Gosling affirm that Sun is committed to free open source community collaboration during his keynote on Wednesday. He ran the audience through the community initiatives Sun are running, including OpenJava, OpenSolaris, GlassFish (an Open Source Java EE 5 Application Server project), NetBeans and the various projects underway at java.net. When it came to discussing Web 2.0, he indicated his dislike of the ambiguous nature of the term, but went on to acknowledge that a lifestyle of community interaction combined with a development model of using the web as a platform had resulted in exciting applications based on user data. On a slide titled "JVM: the integration hub" I was surprised to see Ruby listed next to Java, XML and JavaScript as a JVM development language; presumably a reference to the JRuby project whose lead developers Sun hired last year. One technology James seemed excited about was the Java Real-Time System. He also emphasized that threading and parallelism is becoming more important as we see a flattening in the rate of clock speed increases while core numbers are on the increase.

During the session breaks, Sun's Rupert Key attracted attention with demonstrations of MPK20, Sun's Virtual Workplace. First shown in public at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, the MPK20 client demo allows you to view desktop applications hanging as panels on walls inside a 3D virtual space. While it's not fully interactive just yet, the Wonderland client project aims to add support for collaborative user interaction with the desktop applications in the 3D environment. It's possible for a user to do VOIP conferencing in MPK20 now. A future plan is to implement spatially attenuated audio, where the proximity of your avatar to other avatars will determine relative sound volumes. A fully functional demo is planned for the JavaOne '07 conference later this year.

If you are a music fan, Simon Ritter's demonstration of the Search Inside the Music project would have caught your ear. The research project aims to allow users to use acoustic similarity to find music that 'sounds similar' to music that they already like. A 3D visualization of your music collection reveals the clusters of similar sounding songs. You can even generate play lists that let you take a journey through songs that connect two points in your collection, each song similar to the last but gradually changing genre as the list progresses, e.g. Rock to Soul or Emo to Darkwave.

At the end of the day Brian Leonard and Roman Strobl showed me the new impressive Ruby support in NetBeans. Apparently, one great developer, Tor Norbye is churning out the Ruby editor features on an almost daily basis. I'm definitely going to give this a try for my Ruby on Rails projects, perhaps it's time to finally let go of my own attempt at writing a Ruby editor for jEdit. Plans for GlassFish v2, due out next year, include jRubyOnRails support. It'll be interesting to watch the relative usage of Java versus Ruby in the years ahead now that Sun is backing both languages.

Comments

[Roman Strobl]

Hi Rob,

it was nice talking to you at the tech days! Here are flash demos which show the (j)ruby support inside of NetBeans:

http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/two_demos_jruby_on_rails

Have you contacted Tor Norbye? It would be great if you could contribute to our plug-in.

Let me know at roman dot strobl at sun dot com.

Thanks,

-Roman

[Malgorzata van Leeuwen]

Hi Simon,
Thanks for the great presentation on Open Source at the London Tech Days(heard it twice!).
Is there anywhere I could download your slides from? I am interested in the reading list.
Regards,
Malgorzata