MSA 2 - JSR 249 - Technical Session

A technical session hosted by Nokia and Vodafone where thwy were presenting MSA and the evolution into MSA 2.

MSA 2 will contain 3 stack levels addressing low - mid - high device segment, corresponding to JTWI - MSA sub - Full MSA today.

The low segment excludes graphics and adds sensor api since JSR 248. Mid range focuses on TV broadcast, contactless api, UI customization and XML. High end focuses on IMS with JSR 281.

Some jsrs in MSA 2 are "conditionally mandatory" depending on HW support.

Notably, Nokia, as the co-spec lead still hasn't released a full MSA device. The only vendor that has done that is Sony Ericsson with 14 devices.

There are several new players in the expert group, e.g. Ericsson and TeliaSonera.

MIDP 3 will be included in MSA 2 if released on time. The target schedule is to be finalized in Q4 2008. Just a little bit optimistic, if you ask me, since the same applies to MIDP 3.

Mobility General Session

Jeet Kaul was hosting the Mobility General Session.

First on stage was the CEO for Loopt, a company that has a location based ME application to keep track of your friends.

Next was a presentation of LWUIT - Light Weight UI Toolkit - to be bundled with midlets for consistent user experience across devices. Including great animations and transitions.

Sony Ericsson presented their MSA full set show device - K850i - one of 14 devices with exactly the same application environment. Consistency is key.

Sony Ericsson and Orange expressed their commitment to decrease Java ME fragmentation by creating tighter specifications and better testing through the Java Verified Program.

Sun was announcing that the Java ME SDK is now supporting development of BD-J applications for the Blu-ray environment.

Announcing BDLive.com for developing client-server BD-J applications utilising network.com.

Sun was announcing Project Hydrazine, a means to rapidly create and host web services across all screens. So, basically it's a merge of Project Caroline and Project Destination evolving into a turnkey hosted solution allowing developers to leverage the Sun platform to create applications and services and monetize them without going anywhere else.

Java One Opening

Consumers drives technology innovation.

Rich Green opened up Java One by describing the shift to consumer focused innovation. He got company from Amazon demonstrating the Kindle book reader.

Next on stage was Rikko, SVP from Sony Ericsson that talked about the use of sensors in mobile phones, showing a vision video about seamless networks and unified media.Java is the core strategy to realize this vision.

Nandini was demonstrating a JavaFX mash-up application embedded in a browser. Next thing she was dragging it out off the browser on to the desktop, where it continued to run whith the browser shut down. Also, a desktop shortcut is created, so the JavaFX application can be started without the browser. It looks really neat, and the crowd loved it!

JavaFX to run on all devices.

The same application was also run on a Java ME feature phone.

Later, Eric Klein showcased the same demo running on an Android emulator.

Neil Young on stage!

Rock star Neil Young announcing the release of his entire career on BluRay. Including really cool navigation around songs, pictures, videos, etc.

http://www.java.com/en/java_in_action/neil_young.jsp

Finally, it was the first time I've seen Rich not wearing all black! He actually had blue jeans to his black jacket today.

New Trip Report

Monday morning CET the plane is leaving for San Francisco and Java One.
This will be a really busy and interesting week. The schedule is packed with nine customer meetings with everything from low to high. Some are routine and some are high explosive.

Hopefully I will also be able to attend some tech sessions from which I will put a summary up on Sticky.

So, prepare for a week of no sleep, high mileage and too many Vinnie's specials too late at night.

The End

Sun CEC 2007 is over.
The only thing left is to pick up the sorry peices of my body and transport it to the airport Thursday morning.
Thanks to all organizers, speakers and colleagues that made this unforgettable.
This has been a very different experience at a very different place.
Is this town for real?

Software All-Hands

The SW practice session started with a SGD/SunRay session followed by a presentation and discussion around what is missing in Suns portfolio for us to be able to build solutions and how we need to approach customer requirements on these solutions?
Sorry, but I have a little hard to relate to the discussion taking place here.
A lot of vulture heads in the audience seem to think the same. Are they all in OEM?

Final Day

This dry desert air is starting to dry me out. Both skin and body needs lot of liquid and lotion. (They may be putting something strong in the drinks here as well. What do I know?)
Half a day to go with SW All-Hands and Closing Session. Unfortunately no more tech sessions. I've seen a lot of good ones, and missed some promising ones as well. Luckily enough they will be available online in the near future. From what I understand, that will be multimedia style à-la JavaOne.
So, in the name of eco responsibility; don't print them out - watch them on the screen (if any SRs happen to read this).

What happens in Vegas - Stays in Vegas!

Sin City night @ the Coyote Ugly

The staff is up at the bar and the eyes are standing out like ping-pong balls on Rannee, Andee and Stillee.

El Guitarra

You all know it's impossible not to bring anything expensive and bulky back from the US each time.
Last night I went down to Guitar Center to get an axe for my brother. The directive was to get a black or white one with good look and feel.
I actually spent 2.5 hours trying out the entire store. Since I'm a Les Paul guy myself the final choice was between these three Epiphones.
I actually gave Ibanez, Schecter and Jackson a chance, but in this price range they kinda suck.
I was standing there playing with earphones connected to a Marshall when this sales guy stuck a note under my nose with a big smile.
"Bollocks, didn't I turn off the speaker?"
No, the note read: "You're the smartest cust I've ever seen!"
If you've ever been into a guitar store you'd understand him; lots of self-claimed guitarists and drummers rocking off in every corner.
I guess that shows the difference between shy swedes and loud americans. :)
So, I finally went for the white one plus a trainer with digital effects and mp3 support to play along with your favourite songs.

Java ME Calendar Sync to Sun Calendar Server

Stefano De Toni from Sun Italy demoed his cal sync solution at the Pavilion.

It contains two different modules:
1 - Conversion from Palm Datebook to iCalendar format for one click backups with cal-emea from the dock. All written in Java.

2 - For a two way sync from any MIDP 2.0 device he has developed a calendar midlet that sync with the edge cal.

To extend the integration with the device further Stefano will implement the PIM APIs to be able to populate the midlet from the device cal. For full synchronization with the device there is a limitation in many PIM implementations that prevents the midlet from reading the "last modified" attribute.

I would like to see a head-less midlet doing the end-to-end sync between the residential cal and calc-emea. Or, even just the backup feature for the devices not supporting the "last modified" attribute.

5 Killer Sun Developer Tools Demos

I will give you the basics of this session and you can check it out when it comes online if you want more. Or ask Connors that attended as well.

So, what do we do to improve the reputation of our tools?

This was a walk-through of news in NetBeans 6.

1 - Java Editing Made Simple
* Smart Code Completion is improved witch also will give you constructions of commodity code depending on context.

* Instant Renaming will change all occurrences of for example var names.

* Different high-lighting depending of the type of variable; underlines, italic, etc.

* You can easily detach different modules from the base GUI, e.g., the Editor.

2 - GUI programming
* Easy to create object bindings.

* Localization
Changing if the language reflected directly in the visual designer.

3 - Java Profiling
Built in profiler with a heap walker for performance analysis. easy to get to the code that is causing the symptoms.

4 - Java EE Development
Easy creation of WebServices,EJBs and persistency (using the Java Persistence API).

5 - Ruby on Rails support with full code completion.

The NetBeans demos can be found at http://netbeans.org/kb/index.html

Customers can buy support for NetBeans at http://netbeans.org/kb/support.html

Day 2 - General Session

Eco responsibility with Dave Douglas.
Data centers world wide is responsible for 200M tons of CO2 per year. This number is doubled every 5 years.
Dave was announcing http://OpenEco.org, which is an open source project of a tool for measuring eco gases for an organization. The initiative is funded by Sun.
Question from the the visualizer: Talking about eco responsibility, why is the CEC in Las Vegas?
Unanswered from the stage, though.
Do you measure how iwork users save? It shifts to my house.
A: measurements are being done. Why not sponsor residential solar panels?

Jonathan Schwartz
No suit and tie today! Always enjoyable to listen to Jonathan.
He presented an interesting division of the market and opportunities into how our customers look at their IT strategies. Sun will be investing in companies that see IT as a weapon, not companies that see IT as a cost. We're happy to take their purchase order, but our focus must be where the growth is.
Hypothetical question from Jonathan with regards to our CPU competitiveness:
What if Niagaras could execute x86 instructions?

Sushi Night

We had a team dinner last night at the Hamada. Great Japanese atmosphere with these low tables. You also had to take off your shoes before entering the dining area, like to a Dojo. Imagine 20 pair of feet released after 12 hours walking... The sushi was delicious, though.

JavaFX - Scripting, Mobile and Beyond

Mostly old news
One good thing though that was new to me is the JavaFX Script compiler. It will compile the JavaFX code to byte code. Find it at http://openjfx-compiler.dev.java.net

Claims to be up to 50X faster running the byte code than using the current interpreter mode.

A demo was shown how to recreate a Flickr user experience in JavaFX Script using NetBeans.

Next demo was a cool guitar tuner that I absolutely need to lay my hands on.

Standards Driven SOA, SW Integration, Provisioning and Federation

Description of a demo environment for an end-to-end value prop from Sun in the SOA and Identity space.

The demo shows a travel agency - airline - car rental interaction.

Three key business scenarios:
- partner promotion and SSO
- registration
- user administration

The demo environment consist of Portal Server, GlassFish, Access Manager, OpenESB, Java ES, etc.

Demo requests can be sent to ezqual-demo-interest@sun.com

Next Gen of WEB-2.0 ID Aware Architecture

Fulup started with a really good overview of identity as a concept, comparing analogue life identity handling with the digital age.
Key take-away 1: It is not the attributes that are confidential, it's the connections between them. Cmp. name and medical record.
Key take-away 2: the purpose of identity is not authentication, but authorization. Cmp. driver licence.
The rest of the session was describing all the attributes that need to be considered when deploying identity in the WEB-2.0 context, e.g. user consent and federating Identity Providers.

Open ESB in JavaCAPS.next: Defining the future of SOA based Integration Platforms

Technical Session.
Description of the evolution of the integration platform and how it made it into the JavaEE environment. Future will see more "Extensible Suites", meaning a more pluggable architecture.

JBI (JSR 208) core is a message router handling the interacton between composite applications using different Service Engines for deploymentand Binding Components for transport.
OpenESB is an implementation of JBI and includes IDE, runtime and management (NetBeans and GlassFish).
More and more components from OpenESB will make it into JCAPS and JavaCAPS 5.2 will include JBI Runtime.

Day 1 - General Session

This was probably the coolest opening ever!
No question the theme of the week will be "The Shift" - hyper growth opportunities.
Down to Eart again, Dan Berg was announcing the "CE 2.0"
http://cetwo.sfbay/
A new mash-up of all the different tools we live and breath every day. OneStop, CEpedia, NameFinder, etc. And the real good stuff:
It will be on the Edge!

Margaritaville

Went up the strip a bit.
Great drinks, great company, good looking, ehrr, interior. The band is getting better and better, and Bartie is starting to lose it.
It's night life Vegas style.
Born to be wild!

Off Course

Ups and downs as usual. One par and one birdie chip in!
Chilling at the 19th hole with a Margarita.
Looking forward to the welcome reception tonight.
Let the CEC begin!

Golfing

To kill some time between now and a good tech session we decided to go to Angel Park Golf Club.
After a 1000+ kcal brunch at the Big Buffet at Bally's we headed for the course. Vinnie G, me and KH were picked up by Mark in his rental.
Weather seem to be on our side with 85F degrees and moderate winds.
Don't know if it's good or bad for the future to beat Vinnie today.
I'll let you know.