About: This blog post is part of the “Microsoft at JavaOne 2007” series; it covers the opening keynote at JavaOne and was typed while attending the keynote session at Moscone Center in San Francisco

Hello,

I am at the JavaOne opening keynote, its 8:30 a.m. in the morning and I am seated in the third row from the stage, the hall has a capacity of over 12,000 so I had to stand in line early to get here. The biggest news of the day which has not be been announced yet, is expected to be Sun response to Microsoft’s SilverLight. Sliverlight 1.1 which allows for a subset of the .NET framework to run across platforms and will allow customers to produce extremely powerful next generation web application is a very serious threat to Java and Flash. Today the Java side is expected to announce some sort of a response. I am sitting in the middle of Java enthusiasts with their laptops open....I have to mention that everyone around me is running windows J (and I have had two inquiries so far about my Vista Ultimate OS)

8:40 a.m. The keynote has not started yet, but the music and atmosphere is awesome, so I am not complaining

8:41 a.m. John Gage from Sun is on stage welcoming people to the 81 hours of the 12^th JavaOne. He started by advising engineers not to be shy during their time here. He quoted from the New York Times and said that this JavaOne is about internet connected multi-function devices. He also hinted on how the Java Mobile technology will be becoming open source and that Sun will make some announcements in this regard. He also displayed a solar power generator (10 minute of talk for every 1 hour of sunlight charge). Finally, he announced that it was really hard to make JavaOne carbon-neutral this year due to the difficulty in measuring the environmental impact accurately but he promised to strive for that next year.

9:04 a.m. Rich Green from Sun talked about the state of Java and has  invited Martin Harriman who is making the announcement that Ericson is going to open source some of its key technology and enter in to a strategic partnership with Sun and the open source community (as part of the project glassfish). He also just announced the availability of real time Java (JSR-1) and how developers can use the usual programming tools to develop code for real time.

9:20 a.m. Rich Green has announced that open sourcing of Java is complete and announced a 5 member interim governing board comprising of two members from Sun, 1 from a university and two from industry. He also announced the open sourcing of compatibility certification

9:30 a.m. Rich announced that by next spring there will be releases of Java primarily focused on speed. Now the big announcement is coming, it is called JavaFX which is a family of Java technologies focused on the consumer. The first member of the family is JavaFX Script which a scripting language for rich internet applications designed for content professionals but also easy enough for the general developers.

9:35 a.m. Rich has invited James Gosling who is taking about JavaFX script by “James Gosling and Chris Oliver” (the mention of Chris’s name indicates that it may be the project which was called F3 and seemed to be an incubation type of project, but I may be wrong).  Rich is mentioning that it is ‘unplanned invention’ and confirmed that it was something that Chris was working on his own.  Chris is demonstrating two Web Sites that were done using JavaFX, honestly the demos are a bit disappointing in the sense that they do not really have the Wow effect, it could be because the project was ‘discovered’ quiet late by the management and the team could not put the resources to create compelling demo. James and Rich also mentioned that Sun will work on a tool and will make it available. Rich mentioned that JavaFX would work on the Java SE right now without any modification

9:45 a.m. Rich also just announced the availability of JavaFX mobile version, he mentioned that it is a ‘desktop scale’ OS on the mobile and that it will be freely available to OEM’s worldwide. Rich and Nandani from the JavaFX mobile team is demonstrating JavaFX mobile on the PDA.  The demo has had a problem but Rich was able to handle it with a great sense of humour.  He asked how many people would want it, and about 5 people from 10.000 clapped..... he mentioned that the opinions might change once people have had a chance to look at the device.

9:50 a.m. Marco Boerries from Yahoo is on stage talking about how he plans to reach hundreds of millions of users on the mobile. Marco is now demonstrating the new ‘mobile one search’ and how yahoo is revamping to deliver news, driving directions, flickr and everything else on the mobile.

10:00 a.m. Jonathan Schwartz is on stage now; the announcements seem to over, a bit of anti-climax in terms of the nature and magnitude of the announcements.  I was expecting an announcement around some sort of a partnership between Adobe and Sun but it seems that for now JavaFX is the big announcement. Jonathan is talking about the importance of mobile devices and mentioning that around the world mobile devices are becoming one of the key means of connecting to the internet and North America has been slower in this area compared to the rest. He mentioned that mobile devices are going to be the big focus of next generation of Java technologies.

10:05 a.m. Dr. Djibril Diallo from the United Nations, New York Office of Sport for Development and Peace is here, he is an amazing speaker, the best one so far. He is talking about the fact that it is unacceptable that 1.5 billion people will sleep hungry today and is talking about how technology can act as a catalyst for improving the world.

10:10 a.m. Jonathan Schwartz just announced an ‘engineers without borders program on which Sun plans to work with United Nations. He has now invited Scott McNealy on stage as someone who is dedicated to distributing educational content through technology around the world.

10:15 a.m. Scott made a few (great) jokes including making fun of Rich Green wardrobe’s resemblance to Steve Jobs and then proceeded to imitate Steve Jobs’s hand gesture. Scott also talked about “curriki” which is attempting to deliver K to 12 education to for free.

I am glad to see a big focus on ‘citizenship’ efforts at JavaOne which is a positive development compared to last year. The keynote seems to be coming towards the end and my battery is dying so I am going to post this commentary and post a detailed daily report from the next few days

Best regards,

Mohammad