Coin, Lambda, Jigsaw and EJB Home Automation: My take on the JavaOne 2012 Hyderabad

So nearly 13 years after my first java program, I finally attended a JavaOne. I remember sitting in Chennai years ago wishing I were in California when I first heard of them (or read about talks from them months later); so when I heard about a JavaOne in Hyderabad, I figured it was time. Of course, its not the same thing without Sun hosting it, but I was also interested to see how Oracle rolls one out. Few days of finagling with the powers-that-be later, I was set to go.

I've been to Hyderabad before, but not by air. So when I landed and found an airport that could be mistaken for any mid-size one in Europe or the US, I had to concede that Bangalore with its sneeze-n-you're-either-out-or-on-the-runway airport has been severely outclassed. Add to that the faithful reproduction of a US expressway (with exit numbers, no less) that led from the airport to the city and a die-hard bangalorean like me had to just weep and die a little bit inside. Damn you, you f-in politicians and whoever else who's responsible for our rinky-dink airport and the tragedy that is NH-7. You know you've had the revenue in spades to do a better and quicker job.

And then there was the convention center itself. Pretty much world class, IMO. Easily configurable main hall (attendees know what I'm talking about), a control console in each room, each room equipped with at least 2 screens and 2 LCDs facing the speaker - one to show the slides and one with a timer, ample wait staff and F&B counters, attached hotel - the works. Of course, the event management itself had some typical desi-ness to it that I'll mention below, but in all a very nice place. It had the feel of somebody with systemic thinking being in charge.

Anyhoo onto the sessions themselves. There were 5-7 parallel talks spread across Oracle-specific and Java themes so I'll talk about the sessions I attended:

• Day 1:
•  Keynote: Pretty OK state-of-mobile talk by Mr. Rego. Nice demos of Nano Ganesh (controlling irrigation pumps using Nokia phones) and of controlling cars via phone. Nice message about "looking for problems to solve and the money will follow". Also liked Nokia's message that they're not about creating new things themselves, but enabling and partnering with people who are creating those new things. I liked this message because I've always like Nokia phones as sturdy workhorses of communication and IMO with all the smartphone craziness this is a good middle path to take. Hope it works out for them.
• Aside: The Nano Ganesh project uses the phone's voice connection to control pumps. I spoke to Santosh Ostwal - the creator - and he confirmed there's no API to this - its direct control of the hardware. Sad. It would have been great to write this kind of phone app - the kind that doesnt need a separate data connection.
• Head and tail of Project Coin: Good "Directors cut" review of what its about by Dalibor Topic. Much better than just the changes.
• Data Parallelism with Fork/Join: Blew my mind when they got to Spliterable. Very well explained by David Holmes. He didn't like my fanboy idea of reviving the old java idea of sending code via RMI to another JVM so that we could federate fork/join over multiple JVMs, however. Probably with good reason :). 
• Oracle SOA suite: Caught the last of this because I was talking to David Holmes, so can't say much about it.
• Tech Keynote 1: Nice overviews of Coin, Jigsaw and Fork/Join. Particularly liked Dalibor's animated slides that converted boilerplate java into its functional equivalent.
• Improving MSQL performance with Hadoop: Lost patience. Speaker gave very naive definitions of MySQL and Hadoop and showed an agenda that didn't actually have the title of the talk listed.
• Project Lambda: Excellent build up of the material and exposition of the JSR as it stands.
• Java ME and LWUIT: Attended the end of this lab session. Seemed pretty standard UI stuff.
• OTN Night: Not easy to get a few thousand indian geeks to "get jiggy", but to their credit Oracle tried. First there was a stand-up comic who apparently was a developer at some time, so was billed as a comic in 4 languages: English, Hindi, Java and C++. Sadly his tech jokes stopped at calling himself a Null Pointer. Aside from asking a whole crowd of south indians if "there were any south indians" and making the cardinal sin of assuming all southies are the same when there was a whole wealth of jokes with just mallus alone, he was OK. That was followed by Vasundara Das trying really hard to get 5000 engineers to confirm that the "party was on the dance floor" to her chartbuster "Where's the party tonite?". When I left about 100 hands were up in the air somewhat in chorus with the slightly-off background troupe. The food was good, though :)
• Day 2
• Oracle Develop Keynote: Some clueless event management guy goaded me into this with a "Developer keynote starting, please go, please go", so I went in. 5 seconds in I was thinking "How the hell is this a developer keynote, I'm walking out right now". I remembered, however, that I should probably listen to some Oracle speak for use "at the office" and settled down. It turned out to be pretty Ok after all, with Oracle's Cloud strategy taking center stage. David Pease presented a nice (possibly standard, but nice anyway) cloud adoption strategy and spoke about their public and private cloud offerings. Afterwards, him and another Oracle Manager did a pretty good job of answering my two questions:  How the cloud affects their main revenue stream - big iron database servers (answer: complimentary, not cannibalistic), and what their official response was to NoSQL(ans: berkleyDB. Not convincing, IMO) and Big Data (Ans: Will be treated as extension of existing solutions, not a separate one).
• Interfacing with the interface: Impressive demo of JavaFX, Wiimote, Kinect and Hotspot. It was one of those "It CAN be done with Java too" kinda things. Cool, but dont see the point. Wouldnt you just use the native technologies for Wiimote and Kinect? Still a very balanced and nice talk. Take away: Heard about the JMonkey Engine. Also heard that its pretty buggy :)
• Agility and Scalability @ eBay: Good, solid talk; but nothing new. Walked away into the "interfacing.." talk after a while, returned towards the end and found it taking a predictable course. No fault of the speaker, though. It was me, not him; entirely like seeing George Carlin for the 5000th time and not laughing. The rest of the crowd seemed to like it just fine.
• Jigsaw: Another solid talk by David Holmes. I started reading about the project after the talk and immediately wanted those slides that presented the problem, its implications and solution(s) so well. Reaction to the project itself: Cant wait for it, cant wait to use it. Although I dont get the need for the "default" keyword for default methods. If you're writing a method body within an interface definition, shouldnt that be sufficient indication that its a default method? Holmes' take was to join the mailing lists and either understand or speak up. 
• Nashorn - Javascript on JDK: Short, well presented talk on the new JS interpreter on the JVM. Sunderrajan was awesome at spinning out quick examples to questions right on spot. He was evasive about performance due to safe harbor rules, but was forthcoming enough to say its way better than Rhino. Killer announcement: Node is coming to the JVM, and they already have it working internally. Cant wait.
• Aside: I mentioned that I was excited about Node-on-JVM to Steve Chin and Kevin Nilson and their response was: "why would anyone want to do that?". My answer: admins love the JVM. Put anything inside it, and they'll be OK with it. The JVM is the ultimate production grade sneakware platform :)
• OTN Room: Monitoring Cloud Apps: Spent 10 mins here. People in the audience kept interrupting the speaker with more knowledgable information than he had. Good to get good information, not so good to have the talk's flow being interrupted thus. IMO Ranganath should have just set the rules of engagement better than being polite like he was, or the session should have been a BOF one.
• Java beyond the IDE: Nice if boring-in-the-middle talk by Jay Suri on things less talked about in the Java scene, namely, issues in production. After a long list of issues the Java Platform Group has heard from customers (and their solutions), Suri introduced two tools that were coming to the JDK via JRockit - Mission Control and Flight Recorder. This latter tool is what everyone wants in production - instrumentation for a running JVM - and you can now have it! Expressly to be run in production! From the source! Of course, you'll need an Oracle license for production use, but depending on the price, I can easily see this being put on at least "Test in Production" servers for those hard-to-debug-in-preprod problems. Awesome.
• Having fun with JavEE and Home Automation: Who would have thought of using an EJB server to do home automation? A crazy, funny, energetic brazilian and his wife, that's who.  Vinicius and Yara Seneger were genuinely happy to be in India and gave what was possibly the most lively presentation that I saw. They demoed JHome - a home automation software platform that uses Glassfish and Arduino to create home automation such as lamps that turn on via http, LED lamps that turn to any RGB colour, controlling appliances  via sound. The final demo was a heartbeat monitor that Vinicius had hooked up to some EJB code (Yes! EJB code!) so as to light up a lamp when the heart rate goes over 110 BPS. And of course, he had to jog to get it working. Awesome and endearing. Who cares if they used a whole herd of elephants to swat a fly? The energy of the guy was great. Couldn't have asked for a better last session :).
• Speaking of: why wasn't there a one last hurrah Oracle? I'd have liked one last closing session on the center stage. And: some of us like to see the people behind the show, you know? Get 'em up the stage and let's take a gander at them. 

Tech Reactions/ Opinions:

• UI Frameworks: Java has AWT(hopefully dead now), Swing, JFX and LWUIT (which I didn't know existed till this conference). Exactly how many of them does one language need? I spoke a bit about this to Steve, but he seemed unconvinced that it might be a good idea to consolidate. Maybe the way I put it was off, but is it too much to ask for one language to have one (preferably declarative) way to define a UI across all its deployment profiles?
• Mobile: 
• The elephant in the room was walked all the way around pretty carefully by Oracle. Nokia had one A-bomb, while Oracle billed the "mobile platform that must not be named" quaintly as "other linux tablets". The stoopid questioners mentioned below, however asked pointed questions on integrating with it, however. Was kinda funny to watch the Oraclers tippy toe around these ones.
• The heartening news, however, was that the release schedules for J2ME was merging with the J2SE one and that Java 8 will have one of the ME profiles built in. Should bring solace to J2ME users, i guess. Do you know any? I dont.

General Opinions:

• Speakers almost always took up all the time, leaving no "public Q&A" time. They were of course, super available in the hallway after the talk, but that meant fighting the hordes to get your one question answered.
• There were some really stoopid questioners, which the speakers were gracious enough to deign to answer. 
• Sample: To the nashorn team member: "Will it support eval?". Ans: Of course, its a language requirement. "Will it support closures, lambdas and anonymous functions?" Ans: Of course, its a language requirement.". "Ok, I understand it will support lambdas because of Project Lambda, but what about closures and anonymous functions?" Ans: "Look, we have to, cos its part of the language. And this has nothing to do with Lambdas in Java". This went on for a few more rounds.
• It was even worse in the Oracle Dev sessions where people generally were summarizing the talks in the Q&A sessions.
• Event management was a bit weird in places:
• No wifi. Had to be said. In fact, their "suggestion" was to not get any laptops either. I get that the majority attendees are local and probably have their own data connections, but what about us out-of-towners who might want to tweet you some kudos? Surely the world's largest database company should be able to afford that?
• Long queues to get into a session because Oracle wanted head count. Couldn't you have set the Reader at the door and made it self-service? Many people kept leaving sessions and walking into others anyway thereby skewing your count; and this made for an annoying delay at each session.
• Food service had some desi quirks: 
• I had to literally fight for a second plate at lunch (I discarded my first one after my first course) because they dont give out a plate unless you have a token. Explaining that I'd given mine already and all I wanted was a fresh plate didn't go too well. The second day I learnt my lesson.
• Tea was served at these stations with really nice looking tea cups-n-saucers stacked up. But they didn't serve us tea in them. Instead we got it in paper cups. Yeah, no clue why, or even why they had them on display if they didn't intend to give them out. Once you got your tea and took a sip as you walked away was when you realized there's no sugar. Walk back, and you're pointed to these tables with bowls containing sugar sachets, but no stirrers. Those precious bits of cutlery obviously cannot be left unguarded, so they're in the safe custody of the F&B guy - who could have told you that the first time, but of course he didn't. So walk back, get stirrer, walk back, get sugar. Then drink. I saw this happen over and over again in those two days. Its funny when you know what's gonna happen and you watch some poor sap go over this drill.
• The Swag embargo: At the end of the conference I saw a line snaking towards the registration booth and some people emerging with a t-shirt and mug. The mug I didn't care about, but I'm a t-shirt whore. So I stood in line, not really taking note of the people in line frantically filling out the feedback form. Apparently, you HAVE to fill the feedback form, else you dont get the swag. What if I took the things and came back with the form filled out, I asked? No sir, its the rules, they said. I'll wait right where you can see me, I countered. No sir, those are the rules, they said; helpless against the all-seeing all-dancing mother directive. So I filled it out as Doofenschmirtz, Evil Genius. They gave me the stuff without once looking at the paper. 

Thus went my first JavaOne. Oracle, if you're reading: Now you have my real feedback. Looking forward to more of the good stuff and less of the silly stuff.

Update: Not finding the slides from the talks in some official place, I scoured the internets for them so I could share with my team. Here're what I've found to date:

• Tech Keynote, alternate
• Another version, but with Fork/Join and Spliterable stuff included.
• Fork/Join Alone
• Project Lambda
• JDK 7 and Beyond
• Nashorn: The sort-of-official link from Dalibor's blog post doesnt work. I couldnt find any other place that had the "Future of Javascript on JDK" slides. Comment below if you find it.
• Project Coin
• Project Jigsaw
• The JavaOne India site seems to be geared for uploading of slides at some future date, going by what I found on the site from the one that happened last year in South America. Look there a while later to see if they've uploaded any. Right now (Mid May 2012), the list of talks itself is incomplete.