JavaOne week was kicked off with CommunityOne event on Monday 5/5. If you didn’t attend, you missed a free event that was packed with interesting session.
It seems like Sun is open up in a big way in terms of creating various open sources projects, supporting various popular scripting languages, supporting startups, and embracing open source in a big way. I think that is great, but I wonder how they will make money from it.
One of the tracks at CommunityOne is NetBeans. I must say NetBeans has improved a lot and I am impressed with recent features that were added. I got my hands dirty with NetBean 6.1 and surprised its speed and rich feature set like UML, scripting languages support like Ruby and Rails, PHP and Python (in the near future). Highly recommend that you check out the latest feature of NetBeans. The folks at Sun created a layer called GSF services to allow NetBean to support future languages easily. I saw a demo of developing PHP in NetBeans and it was great. All the usual convenient features like code completion, debugging and deployment are there in NetBeans. This should make a lot of PHP developers happy.
Who would think that Sun is working on a soon to be an open source game server. I attended a presentation about project Darkstart – game server and learned the interesting challenges that they are solving for their massive and multiple online game server. They combine a lot of techniques from various disciplines like enterprise development, distributed system to solve the scaling and failover issues. The main goal is to allow developer to write online games that can scale easily, but without having write code to deal with scalability.
Another interesting session that I attended was about another Sun’s open source project call SocialSite, which basically is an implementation of the OpenSocial specification and more. I think this is great. In the near future it will be easy to integrate the social networking features into a Java web-based application. I am intending to keep an eye on this project and possibly would like to contribute.
Stay tune for my report on JavaOne.
PODIDEA - Diary of Pragmatic Programmer 