JavaOne, day 2, second part.

So, the second part of day two was composed of a few different BOF's. I won't bother to talk about them all separately, since there really wasn't that much information in them.

First of all I went to the Collections Connection, which is always fun. Josh had most responsibility still, even though he's officially at Google now. They talked about the new collections in Mustang, of which the Deque interface is the most important addition. Also, navigable collections have been added. This is more or less SortedSet and SortedMap done right, with navigability from all ways.

My second BOF talked about identity management and federation. I really didn't get much out of this presentation. The presenter showcased a few standards that should be used, and some fairly complicated graphics showing how to interconnect these data transport protocols. Most of the stuff focused on SAML 2.0, XACML and ID-FF.

After that there was the BOF on Java Language and Compiler Issues, where they talked a little about the new compiler API in Mustang. The new packages javax.tools, javax.lang.model and com.sun.source seems really interesting and usable to do neat stuff. Another cool thing they showed was something called the JavacViewer, which more or less gives access to most information that the different compiler types uses internally. Parse trees, annotation processing, internal labeling; it's all there. Very cool.

Last, but not least at all, the late night BOF called "A script for more powerful Java technology-based applications" which talked about how you can leverage different scripting technologies to add a different interface to your application in a few different ways, by providing plugin possibilities, as a way of adding new features quickly, and also to make macros for getting your power users happy. The presenter used different kinds of scripting to demonstrate these techniques. Some parts integrated BeanShell, and a big part of the demonstration talked about how to write your own domain specific language, and a parser and definition for this. As the session was late at night, and there were fairly few people attending, it tended to drift to different subjects depending on questions from the audience, but this didn't detract at all. It was mostly very interesting and one of the better sessions this JavaOne.

One of the best reasons and rationales for adopting scripting languages as an approach is for your own developer needs. It makes sense to add scripting support so you can explore a huge code base, test out corner cases easily. (I know I constantly do this, start up JRuby or BeanShell inside Emacs, and test something there before using it in a real Java application).

After this session, me, Pop, Bob Evans, Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo (the JRuby guys) and a few other went to a pub, drank some beer and continued talking scripting, JRuby, Lisp and other cool stuff for some parts of the night. I've learn some very neat stuff, and we've talked some more about the future for implementing RubyGems in JRuby. It will be very soon.