Sun Tech Days 2006 A Worldwide Developer Conference

About a week back, a worldwide conference was held by the Sun in Chennai. It was a display of most of the latest technology by Sun (including Java) and some of its peers in the field.

The company I work for, sent me for this conference. I have only faint knowledge of Java, and no working experience on any of the Sun systems or related products. This may make you wonder why I was sent for the conference, but it seems to me that organizations can be mysteriously stupid.

Anyway, I land up at the Chennai Trade Centre with one of my collgeue (who is unlike me, and is quite well verse in developing Java applications) with a commute on my Bullet early morning on 7th of February. After a quick swipe of our badges' barcode (that were given to us few days earlier by our Learning and Development department) we had a good cup of coffee, and were off to listen to the welcome speech.

Read more in my blog entry...

I hope, giving the link to my blog above is not considered as spam. If it is so, moderators, please do remove it. Also, in my blog, it is not much but rant on my experiences those two day (7th and 8th Feb).

Anyway, what I wanted to ask is this: I have gained a bit on the technologies used in the industry because I went to that conference. Can I post some articles here? If it is fine, I would be glad to post some articles here (that I can salvage out of the notes I took during the sessions in the conference).

SPAM SPAM. Super SPAM J/k Would be glad to have your articles here. Go ahead.

You scared me m^e!

As said in my blog (link in the first post), I attended quite a lot of sessions. I will start off here from the first one. I may not post articles on all of them, as I said earlier - the Java and related technology are new to me. So, here goes.

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Day 1 (7-FEB-2006): TRACK 1: Java SE: Tiger, Mustang, Dolphin and You!

This session was given by Peter Kessler from Sun Microsystems. He seemed to be a pretty talented person. He is involved in the Garbage Collection module of the Java technology. (His blog post on Chennai Sun Tech Days: link)

Starting off, he explained the present version of Java, and the planned releases. I did not know this before, and thus it was insightful.

Java SE 5.0 is named Tiger. This is the latest Java you will find out there. Ofcourse there should be beta version of Mustang now, but Tiger is fully compliant. It have quite a bit of additional features when compared to the earlier versions. Some of them are:

-Enchanced Loop (language feature): Iterating through a collection or array is much more easier now, and one need not use the indexes in for loops. (link)

-Varargs(language feature): Now, Java is able to harness the variable argument list feature. (link)

-Garbage Collector Ergonomics (Virtual Machine feature): (link)

And a lot lot more. These were some of the things out of the few he explained. For a full list, visit this link.

Next, he discussed on the Mustang, the Java SE 6.0. The beta version must have released by now. One thing to be noted in this release is that most of the features from Java EE (Enterprise Edition) has been pushed down to this Java SE in the Mustang version. The sources for Mustang can be found at link.

He even disclosed about the next Java version, Dolphin. Some of the things that would be included in this version would be:

-Invoked dynamic bytecode may be looked into.

-The present Java Archives (JAR) are not scaled well and in Dolphin this would be addressed by JSR-277.

-Another exiting thing about this version is that it may make XML available at the source code level itself. I mean, XML libraries are already existing in the platform, but they intend to make a data type that could hold XML data in it. That is, a concept where XML is a native data type.

I do not know for sure, when it will be rolled out, but here is the link that you need to keep looking at regularly to know that: Dolphin Link.

Peter also gave some of the information on JRL, that is, Java Research Licence. This is intended for most of us, who want to download the Mustang source code, and start tinkering with it.

> JRL authorizes us to use the source code for evaluation and non-commercial use

> JRL is a two page click-through licence, that is not bogged down with too much of legal terminologies.

> Looking at the source code does not taint you - that is, it is not a copyright violation (because it is open-source, ofcourse)

The two other licencing options are Java Internal Use Licence (JIUL) and Java Distribution Licence (JDL).

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Phew! Thats about it. Now I am off to consider, what other session-articles should I put down here.