The open-sourcing of the Java platform has brought new blood, fresh ideas and energy to the Java community, says Laurie Wong, product business manager for Sun software in Australia and New Zealand.
“That made a huge difference at JavaOne this year compared to last,” he says. “The feedback from the community has been very positive, mainly because it makes Java really simple to adopt.”
Open-sourcing Java under the GPL licence has given Sun the opportunity to include Java in all the major Linux distributions and it has provided the open source community with a cross-platform language, he says.
From a local developer’s perspective, some of the most interesting announcements at Sun’s recent Java One conference were, of course, JavaFX Script, he says, but also the open-sourcing of NASA’s World Wind application.
During the conference, in San Francisco, Computerworld heard some attendees asking what purpose another scripting language, like JavaFX Script, could possibly fulfil. Wong thinks JavaFX Script will get rid of a lot of the “fiddly” things developers now have to get involved in to create rich internet applications.
JavaFX Script is the equivalent of Adobe Flex or the Windows Presentation Framework and “that is where everyone wants to go with web development”, says Wong. The tools for the new scripting language will not be available for another year, though.
World Wind is similar to Google Earth, says Wong. “NASA has open-sourced it and the APIs are available in NetBeans, so you can mash up [those] applications with any Java applications,” he says.
Another interesting conference announcement concerned Ericsson’s contribution of its SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Servlet 1.0 compatible application server to the GlassFish community.
— Ulrika Hedquist travelled to JavaOne as a guest of Sun Microsystems.