What Sun Tech Days in Prague was like

The big show left me with mixed feelings, but let’s take the sessions I attended one by one.

Sun keynote

Showman Reggie Hutcherson, ably assisted by Simon Ritter, gave us a quick look at Sun’s vision of the future. The main idea was to connect everything you can imagine. In Sun’s future absolutely everything has its own IP address, which uniquely identifies it. Your glasses will have an IP address in case you leave them somewhere. Your white underwear will have an IP address so your washing machine can tell, before you start it, whether you accidentally mixed it in with the colored laundry. Naturally, it will all be run by software written in Java.

Building Effective Applications Using Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.4 and Preparing for J2SE 1.5

Simon Ritter presented the most important changes in Java 1.4: extensions to the I/O API, mostly buffers and channels. He also discussed Java Web Start, which makes it easy to install and upgrade Java applications over the internet. Then came Java 1.5, but beyond the much discussed generics, boxing, metadata and static imports, I learned nothing new.

Solve Your Development and Deployment Headaches using Sun Systems

Quite an interesting talk, since I came in knowing almost nothing about the subject. Srikanth Raju first piqued my interest with a description of a Java platform on Linux that included Mozilla, StarOffice and Sun ONE Studio, among other things. He then covered Solaris and what I found the most interesting part of the talk: the grid concept.

I would describe the grid concept as bringing hardware, software and other resources under one framework, Grid Engine, so that resources such as computing power, knowledge and information can be used fully. Grids can be composed and joined into larger units. You work with a grid by submitting jobs. For example, I imagine expressing a computationally intensive operation as a job through the grid’s standard interface, then letting it run.

Programming Puzzles

A short quiz on Java gotchas with some discreet advertising for Joshua Bloch’s otherwise excellent Effective Java. The code snippets were supposed to show how well you knew Java. I was almost at the very back and could hardly read the code. I wasn’t taken with Dr. Doris Chen’s talk either, since I had trouble understanding her.

Security and Identity Solutions Using Java Technology

A very well delivered talk by Sang Shin, mainly about securing web services. The focus was securing the messages themselves rather than their transport over SSL. He covered SAML, XML Encryption and XML Signature.

Developing Wireless Applications using MIDP2.0, WMA and MMA

Srikanth Raju had a lot to say in this last session on wireless applications in J2ME. It was the longest talk and included a MIDlet demonstration on his phone. The Wireless Toolkit 2.0 demonstration, setting security permissions and signing the application JAR were all worth seeing. It was among the best things I heard at the conference.

As I said at the start, Sun Tech Day left me with mixed feelings. The event was very well organized, but I was disappointed by how brief some talks were. If I’m right, it’s usually planned as a two-day event, which would explain why the presentations had been cut back to the essentials. The Java 1.4 and 1.5 session was probably the clearest example. I learned practically nothing new.

Most speakers were easy to understand, and Sang Shin in particular surprised me. Dr. Doris Chen disappointed me, perhaps through no fault of her own. It was also interesting to see so many attendees from Poland, Slovakia and elsewhere.

This was the second Sun Tech Days in Prague. Despite my mixed feelings, the positives outweighed the negatives. I hope the big show comes to Prague again.

Related links

• Day’s agenda
• Speakers and short bios
• Jablok.cz, 19 November 2003: 18 November — Sun Tech Day
• Pavlův zápisník, 18 November 2003: Sun Tech Days Prague