I really enjoyed “The Toy Show” this morning. James Gosling went through a flurry of different demos from around the “cool” Java world. I was especially impressed with Project Wonderland (http://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/), a virtual workplace environment, and with the real-time robotics demos. Unfortunately I was so sucked in that I didn’t get any good photos.
If anything you could call this my day on the back end. I attended four sessions, two of which were focused on that.
It has been a whirlwind of a day. I’ve been to two keynotes (close to 5 hours of information there) and one technical session. Couple that information with what I heard at Java University yesterday, and you find many common themes. One that keeps coming up is the emerging trend of making other languages, particularly dynamic/scripting languages, first-class citizens on the JVM.
According to Wikipedia, “Dynamic programming language is a term used broadly in computer science to describe a class of high level programming languages that execute at runtime many common behaviors that other languages might perform during compilation, if at all.
I’m currently sitting in this session - Graeme Rocher is the presenter. He is the creator of Grails, which is Groovy’s answer to the Ruby on Rails like development experience. He’s currently doing Q&A, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to write a short entry. So far this session is awesome! Graeme is a great presenter and has had the perfect balance of slides and live coding. Unfortunately they ran out of slides before I got to the presentation (more on the sometimes laughable logistics at JavaOne later), so I’m having trouble remember details to write about (they’ve promised to email me the slides).