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A Sleepy JavaOne


By Allen Holub
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June 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
As I write this column, JavaOne is just winding down. This year’s conference was one of the biggest ever, but interestingly, the least energetic of them. There was just nothing new to engender the sort of buzz that I’ve seen at some prior conferences.

Part of the problem is that the hot topic of the minute is AJAX, and the server side of an AJAX transaction is old-hat Java stuff: servlets and the like. A lot of the sessions were devoted to the client side, but the client side in AJAX is entirely JavaScript, not Java.

The one truly interesting AJAX-development development was Google’s new GWT package (Google Web Toolkit, at code.google.com/webtoolkit), which lets you develop the browser-hosted client side entirely in Java. GWT includes a widget library that you program in Java, and a compiler that translates that Java to JavaScript for deployment on your Web page. It’s a way to do AJAX without having to write any JavaScript at all.

In spite of the claims I was hearing to the contrary from the JavaScript aficionados, I think that JavaScript is a miserable, inherently buggy language. Since GWT lets you continue a true object-oriented paradigm onto the client-side code, it actually makes AJAX viable, something that I’ve been dubious about up to this point.

There were a few language/API-related changes of interest.

First of all, there’s absolutely no excuse for not using Java 5 if you aren’t already. Java 5 is just plain better than all previous versions.

Java 5 incorporates language features that make your code better (more reliable, with less syntactic clutter); it is supported by every major platform and vendor; and unlike any prior Java version, Java 5 has measured five-nines reliability. Most important, all of the significantly cool things that were demonstrated at JavaOne require language features that are unavailable to you in prior Java versions (primarily annotations). Upgrading your system to Java 5 should be a major priority.




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