There always seems to be an common theme to each JavaOne conference, and this year although I only got to attend the CommunityOne day and then the first day of JavaOne, it appears there is a continued focus on the community and building social networking tools and sites, and a continued push for JavaFX.
It seems the last couple of years pushing specific technologies has taken a backseat instead to focus on what you can do with the technology. There was the mobile push for a while, then social networking, community building and open source, and for the last 2 years, JavaFX to build engaging client-side apps.
I admit this year JavaFX curiosity got the better of me. Two years ago (?) JavaFX was announced with lots of smoke and mirror demos. Last year it was released. This year they’re stil pushing it hard with plenty of sessions, so I decided to attend a few of the sessions to find out what it’s all about. I’m impressed with the goals and aims of the FXScript language. It got me really interested to see a domain specific language like this and how much of the plumbing and technical details can be abstracted away. My main interest coming away from the sessions was not how can I use JavaFX, but how and when will the main Java language evolve to provide domain specific abstractions so we think less about the technologies – JSP pages, Servlets, EJBs, data access etc, and think about build business systems declaratively – will this ever happen?