Thoughts About

JavaOne 2006: Day One

I'm back at JavaOne after signing up at the last minute. And I'm quite happy to be able to attend JavaOne again this year. Really everybody who's anybody in is Java here. At the key note, you can clearly see the mobile push Sun's continuing (Motorola's on stage showing some new models) and at the moment, Java's has a pretty good momentum going for it. They showed some VB (Visual Basic) integration and talked about open sourcing the whole JVM, both obvious signs of Sun feeling very strong of Java's current position and market share. One worth number mentioning is that according to some stats Sun was showing, is that 41% of all Java developers are working on Java client applications. To me, it's surprising because Java's still not on the desktop and guess I've been working on the server side Java apps for too long.

I attended some Mustang/Dolphin (Java SE 6 and SE 7, respectively) sessions to gather some info on what's happening in Java's future. I'm actually much more enthusiastic about Mustan's features now, earlier I had been thinking that it too useful release. One thing that was complete news to me is that Sun will offer Derby (originally Cloudscape pure Java DB) as a bundle together with a final Mustang JDK release. That notion got me into attending a Derby session later that day. Some things that are meaningful for us is that Apt (Annotation Processing Tool) and annotation processing will be handled by standard javac - definitely a good thing. Another useful thing is improvements in ResourceBundle implementation, e.g a resource cache; improvements that are long due. The final Mustang release is just around the corner.

Also, I managed to get into TestNG session (Beyond JUnit), I swear the line to the session was half a mile long, never seen anything like it. Either there must be a lot of people interested in unit testing or unhappy about JUnit, or both. TestNG is quite interesting though: it fixes some of the annoyances in JUnit, is based on annotations and just does everything a little bit better than JUnit, but doesn't offer anything major over JUnit.

As said, I went to the Derby session because of the earlier Mustang session and I must say Derby is much better than I thought. I've used HSQLDB before and I thought it's pretty much comparable to it, but I've been wrong. They claim Derby's faster than MySQL on large data set and overall, it's both very mature, "commercial-grade" and small. At the presentation, they've positioned it as embeddable database and showed several demos of that, but it could do much more. Now I'm thinking this should be the database you deploy before running your db unit tests because being 100% Java DB, it's just so simple to do that.