JavaOne Sessions Now Available
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Sun has recently released the media from the 2008 JavaOne sessions on the Sun Developer Network site. Using your (free) SDN login you can listen to many of the sessions as well as read the transcription and view the Power Point presentation. Here are some of the sessions that I found noteworthy back when I attended the conference in May:
* Creating a Compelling User Experience
I’ve been told that this was the highest rated talk of the conference, and it was probably my favorite as well. As the title suggests it focused on usability issues, quoting liberally from usability guru Jef Raskin. I walked away feeling inspired, which I imagine is the highest accomplishment any talk can hope to achieve. I highly recommend watching this talk.
* Extreme GUI Makeover: In the Real World
Despite the campy name, this session was also excellent. Given by the same speaker as “Compelling User Experience” this talk was more of a experiential in how to implement some of the practices learned in the above session and apply them to an actual application. The application used as a case study a port of an old COBOL application to a Swing application. Not only was this talk excellent, it also directly related to my current project.
* Project Aura: Recommendation for the Rest of Us
This session deserved a Rock Star award, but did not receive one I suspect because it was most likely attended by disgruntled conference goers who did not get into Joshua Bloch’s talk, which was scheduled at the same time. Speaking of which…
* More “Effective Java”
I think Joshua Bloch has morphed into a Brand larger than himself at this point. In addition to getting your copy of “Effective Java, 2nd ed.” signed by him, you also received a T-shirt with the book’s cover printed on it. Let me repeat that: a T-shirt with the cover of the book on the shirt. I felt Effective enough with Java after reading the 1st edition, so I did not get a signed book, or a shirt. I wish I had one of those shirts though because I can’t imagine a more embarrassing piece of Nerd Schwag.
* Design Patterns Reconsidered
This was a worthwhile talk. A nice little design nugget that I took away from it was to pass “context” objects around in favor of getting global state from e.g. Singletons. All this time I’d been using Singletons like a complete moron.
* Writing Games With Project Darkstar
If you talk to me for any length of time greater than five seconds, I’m bound to mention that I used to work on Project Darkstar. Here are typical ways I’ll sneak it into the conversation:
Doug: Hey do you want to get some lunch later?
me: I used to work on Project Darkstar.
and:
wife: Can you change the baby’s diaper, hon?
me: Remember when I used to work on Project Darkstar?
I went to this session solely to inform those sitting around me that I used to work on it (the project, not the session). Usually people would say they “weren’t impressed”, or “so what?”, or “then why are you here?”. I don’t know why there were so many jerks at that session.
* Project Wonderland: A Toolkit for Building 3-D Virtual Worlds
“Wonderland” is virtual collaborative environment, targeted toward distributed teams. The main differentiator of this project vs. other collaborative tools is that wonderland showcases a 3D environment, so that virtual spaces can more closely approximate real physical spaces.
Avatars can stand at a virtual mic so that they can broadcast to the room, for example. Since it mimics distance annuation, if two people would like to have a private conversation, they can simply move away from the main conversation. Like many Sun research projects, it serves more as a proof of concept rather than anything close to a product.
The gamer in me can’t help but recoil at the extremely low poly-count models, and non-textured environments. Indeed, it seems that they could achieve a similar effect by having everyone install World of Warcraft and enabling voice chat. At least then you could walk around with a bad ass dwarven axe or something.
Speaking of MMOs, Wonderland is powered on the back-end by Project Darkstar (fun fact: I used to work on Project Darkstar). Its 3D environment is provided by Java3D, but I understand it will make the move to the JMonkeyEngine in the near future. Speaking of jme…
* Creating Games on the Java Platform with the jMonkeyEngine
I really wanted to see this talk, but had a schedule conflict. The jMonkeyEngine is a 3D engine, written in Java, much like Java3D, but targeted toward game development. As a (very) amateur game hobbyist, I’ve really enjoyed working with jme (not to be confused with Java Micro Ed). It sports many of the features of real modern game engines such as bloom effects, water and cloth simulation, motion blur and particle effects. Its performance easily rivals 3D engines written in C. To me this stands out as the paragon of how Java is Not Slow.
This video was shown at the Java Gaming BoF (”Birds of a Feather”, which were less formal technical sessions often held after dark), and is worth checking out. Note that this is showcasing an internal “world builder” type tool developed by NCSoft that is not available to the public.
* The Minion Search Engine: Search, Text Similarity And Tag Gardening
Again, I wish I had seen this talk, but instead I wasted away at some Groovy session. Steve and Jeff (the presenters) deserve extra kudos since this was an alternate talk penciled in at the last minute. Despite the hardships though, they were able to walk away with a Rock Star award, proving that even Canadian citizens can rock like Americans.
* Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community
This was a talk detailing some quick tips on how to ruin an Open Source Community, or so I naively thought based on the title. I went into this session all excited about finally being able to deal a fatal blow to the Spring Community (they know what they did). About halfway through the talk though, I started getting the sense that perhaps the title was tongue in cheek, and that actually the speaker was giving us these tasty tools of destruction not to implement, but rather to avoid. It didn’t matter either way. I had tried most of these tips myself at some point or another with limited success.
2 Responses to “JavaOne Sessions Now Available”
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Feeling already effective eh? No room for improvement, eh? Reached the pinnacle, EH???
good stuff. thanks for making me jealous again dude.
Thanks for the info, Sten. You have definitely saved me some time (and cracked a few laughs) with your post. Thanks for sharing!