JavaOne 2008 Conference (3) - Consumer Java

Java has been there for more than a decade. The JavaOne 2008 conference shows that the technology is maturing, new ideas keep coming, and lots of future opportunities are still finding their ways. Here are some of my notes on JavaOne 2008 for Consumer and Desktop Java.

Blu-ray is the new standard
The war is over. Blu-ray is the high-definition storage media standard. This means every single player from now on will have a Java VM in it. On the opening day, rock star Neil Young releases his music collection on Blu-ray. Usually people buy collection album several times because the second collections contains a few new songs. With Blu-ray (BD-live), you can simply purchase the extra inside the player. Digital content goes into another era, so are the developers. There are open-source communities for BD-J platform that enable regular developers to write content for home-made Blu-ray discs. It is definitely cool to write code my home video, or is it?

Java card runs Servlet and GCF
Strange idea but seems work pretty well. Java card 3.0 can accept http request inside the card. It sounds crazy in the beginning to run Servlet inside a credit-card like thing. This opens a lot of possibilities since the client side doesn’t need to implement or deploy any rich client code just for logging in the user, and http can also provide rich experience if it is well-designed. Another surprise is the generic connection framework (GCF) originated from the J2ME CLDC world. The card can open another connection using the connection framework, so the card can be used as a streaming mediator. For example, the card itself can be used as a stream decoder so the streamed video can be viewed only when the card is inserted, and the algorithm never leaves the card.

CLDC proved success – not just for phones
Thanks for hardware innovation. Things ran only in a smart phone now runs inside a plastic card. This year the show devices include a pen that runs J2ME CLDC, and motion/hear sensor that has a JVM inside it. Java was designed for embedded devices, and seems it is still going to be that way.

U.S. mobile app market is tightly controlled. Asia is the market of freedom
In the U.S., 95% of mobile market is controlled by the service provider. Another 4% are influence by the service provider. In other word, only 1% users have the choice of their own mobile solution. Asian market has less control from service provider, and the mobile application market is way bigger than the U.S. Freedom boosts the economy. I really hope U.S. service providers could give more freedom to the application creators. Let’s see how Apple doing after June.

Desktop Java - JavaFX
JavaFX is still trying to prove that Java technology is not dead inside a browser.

Java SE 6 Update 10 (a.k.a. 6u10)
Java 6 u10 is highly anticipated, and might be the only hope for JavaFX. Java 6 u10 will download only the minimum kernel (about 4MB) to get user started. Compare to 14MB of full JRE, I think this size is much more attractive to the end user, as it is a little closer to Flash download size (2MB).
Finally Mac is officially supporting Java 6, and MacBook Pro is everywhere in the crowd