Returning from a day at the Sun Tech Days conference which aimed to shed light on all the latest technologies that cover the current developments of Web 2.0. Few people have traveled to this third day of the conference, however this has not prevented her full of novelties.
The morning began with a Keynote technique presented by Rags Srinivas , speaking of Sun, which gave us an overview of recent technological advances, especially in Java with the benefits of Glassfish , the application server home.
The day continued with a session on virtualization products offered by the company VmWare , one of the main sponsors of the conference. Although interesting session this very commercial for my taste has not excited the crowds, because quite removed from the objectives of the day.
Subsequently, Joey Shen and Guillaume Laforge we presented the different scripting languages, which are now supported natively in the Java SDK version 6.0 . Guillaume Laforge, who is behind the project Groovy , was able to outline the benefits of using such a scripting language, through an example where in a few lines of code, he showed us the possibility of act directly on the browser and its contents. This demonstration was truly baffling because of the simplicity of the Groovy language. Scripting and promises some wonderful opportunities for Java developers by simplifying writing of code and use of advanced components thanks to the many existing libraries.
The morning continued with the presentation of Java DB , which is none other than the Sun supported distribution of the open source database Derby to Apache. Not very exciting, this intervention has not really brought major innovation. Sun seems to have difficulty in convincing the assistance of the strengths of its products.
The afternoon was devoted to the presentation of the platform development of Adobe Flex technology that offers attractive for developing rich applications. Michael Chaize and Christophe Rooms we have a copy intervention that has excited the audience by the possibilities offered by advanced Flex and through the development environment Flex Builder , truly functional and well integrated with Java technologies. An environment that remains owner and paying and who is in direct competition with the open source offering proposed by OpenLaszlo . The end of the session focused on opportunities are offered by technology Apollo , just out, which allows to implement a web application directly on the desktop of his favorite OS: a small revolution in perspective.
The day ended with the presentation of recent additions to the SDK 6.0, and among others the use of annotations for the creation of the persistence layer of J2EE applications.
You can say, Sun has put the package to showcase its products, including Glassfish, Java DB or simply on the innovations introduced by the 6.0 SDK. However, what remains for me the most salient points of this day are certainly the use of scripting that will simplify the software development and the potential for the creation of Flex user interfaces.
