Day three of JavaPolis, the first conference day. A long keynote and one hour sessions afterwards.
The keynote started with a welcome of Stephan Janssen, the organizer of JavaPolis. Bruce Eckel told a bit about Open Space, and the rest of the keynote it was mostly James Gosling. James presented some statistics and figures of Java users and downloads, and encouraged everyone to visit dev.java.net more often. When talking about mobile devices James said something quite funny:
You can even use COBOL on a mobile device, but you you're probably pretty sick when you do that. But hey, we're in Belgium, right?
Another point of interest is NetBeans 6.0. I have been playing around with it a couple of days now, but apparently today is the official release. It has a lot of improvements and works a lot smoother. Also it has support for a lot of languages out of the box.
One of the sessions attended today was Google Web Toolkit by Dick Wall. I like to listen to Dick and therefore I decided to see this presentation.
It turned out Dick only was talking a small part of the presentation, giving a quick overview of GWT. The rest of the session was about Didier Girard showing some samples. In fact I am not quite sure what the examples were all about. Something with OpenSocial and Orkut. I didn't quite knew what he was trying to tell us, or what he wanted to learn us. So that was a disappointment.
However, I did remember a couple of things, for example why I should use GWT when wanting to build AJAX websites:
- When GWT compiles/transforms Java to JavaScript, it does a lot of browser specific optimizations
- The GWT compiler only compiles what is needed for the application, so the clients downloads keep small
- Developing your JavaScript in Java enables/eases unit-testing, benchmarking and JavaDoc
- Google claims perfect caching of compiled scripts. That actually does not say me much, but I assume it's a good thing
- You don't have to take into account cross browser, cross platform and cross IDE compatibility problems, GWT takes care of it all.
I guess you have to try it out to see if it is as easy as it sounds. I had some good experience with DWR, but had to code some JavaScript, I wonder if it is all easier in GWT, I'll have to find out soon.
Tomorrow there are a lot of interesting sessions and speakers. Joshua Bloch, Neil Gafter, Dick Wall, Carl Quinn, Joe Nuxoll, Ed Burns. Pff, what a line up. The JavaPosse live session I really have to attend. I religiously listen to their podcast and being part of one would be great. Of course I have to try to actually something intelligent, but I'll probably say something really stupid :). Really looking forward to tomorrow.
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