Enterprise Java may not be as trendy these days as social networking, HTML5, or mobile computing, but it remains a mainstay in IT and will receive plenty of attention at this week's annual signature conference devoted to the now-16-year-old Java platform.
The JavaOne conference, being held in San Francisco in conjunction with the Oracle OpenWorld event, features a plethora of discussions on enterprise Java, ranging from Java EE's (Enterprise Edition) impacts on both multicore processors and the Google App Engine cloud platform to Java EE Web Profile. Java EE relevance in the cloud as well as its extensibility will be topics, as will Java EE behavior-driven development, an evolution of test-driven development.
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The state of Java is actually pretty good nowadays, IDC analyst Al Hilwa said: "Overall, I would say that Java is in better strategic shape on several levels. The most important aspect is unblocking some of the politics and moving forward with the SE (Standard Edition) 7 and SE 8. That SE 7 has shipped has to be seen as greatly encouraging for the community. Enterprise developers are definitely waiting to see when Java EE 7 will finally ship. I think the community is definitely waiting to see how some of the cloud support ideas in EE 7 are going to be leveraged by vendors."
This year's JavaOne marks the second year in which Oracle has produced the conference, following its early-2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which founded Java in 1995 and had produced the show for years. Other topics that will get their moments at the event include HTML5 and JavaFX, the Java-based rich client application platform. Java's support for HTML5 will be covered, as will the notion that HTML5/JavaScript and Java are complementary Web technologies.
JavaFX 2.0, the next release of the platform, will get an airing and may even be released at the conference itself. The road map for JavaFX had it being released in the third quarter of 2011, which ended this past Friday. Version 2.0 features APIs for using such Java features as generics and multithreading, as well as hardware-accelerated graphics.
JavaFX's impact on Wall Street will be discussed at the conference in a session presented by a developer from software vendor Gorilla Logic. The company has used JavaFX to add animation and multimedia capabilities to an application for financial traders. JavaFX made sense because the application already was written in Java, said Eric Bruno, senior software developer at Gorilla. "It's a Java Swing application that we've been incorporating JavaFX into to bring the new rich Internet application paradigm into it."
Oracle plans to discuss Java SE advancements, implementation of non-Java languages targeting the Java Virtual Machine, modularization of the platform, and cloud and mobile opportunities. IBM will be on hand to emphasize its own commitment to Java, while Intel will talk about Java as it pertains to that company's architecture.
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