I don’t know you, but I feel great to start a day when the sky is blue and the sun is shining. It was such a morning in San Francisco when JavaOne attendees headed to their first sessions of the day. I had selected two main themes for the 3rd days sessions: Mobile Application Development and Transactions.
“Java Binding for OpenGL ES (JSR 239)” was the title of Timothy Fagan (Ishi Systems) and Dario Laverde (NYCJava.net JUG Leader)’s talk. This was a very good and informative session for me. They started by introducing the typical OpenGL development and mentioned some of the difficulties alongside the awkwardness of the programming model. Then they introduced their library, called SkylightOpenGL, that sits on top of OpenGL ES and that provides the developers with a more intuitive API. I liked the demos and being able to see some of the source code was a great help. So if you are doing mobile Java development and are interested in OpenGL then you should check their library.
The talk given by Ilja Laurs, the CEO of GetJar was the best one I attended today. GetJar is the most popular mobile app portal after Apple’s AppStore. His talk was entitled “Mobile Apps: Where Do We Go from Here?”. I’m not easily impressed by stats in general however Laurs’ presentation was great to outline the current and the near future of mobile application market. With their 1.2 billion downloads to date, GetJar is at the right spot to talk about tendencies, user profiles, different markets and predictions. One of the not-so-surprising news was the growth of Android. Google’s Android is the fastest growing market. Last month alone, this market recorded an amazing 280% growth.
According to Laurs, active data subscriptions drive the app market, in an ecosystem where we are going to have 5 billion devices by the end of 2010. 27% of those are currently data subscribers. This figure will jump up to 45% in 2 years and 60% in 3 years, which predicts a very healthy market in the years to come. Furthermore, the app economy will increase 7 times in the next 3 years. 50 billion application downloads are expected in 2012. And the incredible forecast is that as soon as 2013, the app market will be bigger then the entire music market. In 2012, the app market is expected to generate some $17.5 billion whereas the music market will generate $23 billion.
Another interesting trend is about the pre-installed mobile applications: On-deck application distribution will shrink to 20% from the current 60% by 2012. And currently, a single-platform application doesn’t look like a good strategy for optimum growth.
Two sessions outshone the others within the “Transaction” theme. The first one was Mark Little (JBoss – RedHat)’s “Transactions: Overused or Misunderstood”. This was another excellent session. Little not only masters this topic but he is a great speaker as well. After briefly talking about Java and Transactions, he went through the ACID properties and explained why Two Phase Commit alone does not provide ACID guarantees. He also spent some time in demystifying the myths created by anti-transaction sentiments: “They add overhead for no benefit”, “Too expensive and bloated”, “I don’t need atomicity”, etc. Then he talked about multi-core CPUs and STM, when to use transactions and when to avoid them. All in all, it was a very informative and a very enjoyable session.
The second talk was entitled “Bridging Transactions from Java EE to .NET” and was presented by William Heinzman from JNBridge. I’m always interested in attending interoperability talks because in DSI we develop applications in Java and in .NET and most of our systems are large enterprise systems, where we have to work in heterogeneous environments. Therefore, interoperability is part of our reality.
To be perfectly honest, Heinzman’s talk started quite dull however it quickly picked up pace and turned out to be a pretty good one. After briefly introducing two phase commit transactions, Heinzman talked about the differences in Java and .NET implementations. Theoretically the interoperability between a Java and a .NET system should be easy as they both implement the same specification but once again reality is bitter (One thing that my experience proves me over and over again is that in theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they aren’t). It was tragically funny to hear that Heinzman couldn’t put together a demo that showed how to use Transaction Internet Protocol, WS-Atomic or WS-Coor. I don’t doubt his skills but it just shows how unusable these technologies are. And he mentioned that he knew only one person who managed to get a system working using these technologies but the performance had been abysmal. Then he talked about cross-platform transaction bridging and the future of transactions. If you’re interested in cross-platform transactions, you should check his company’s products.
After the sessions, Oracle threw an amazing party, which took place on Treasure Island, between San Francisco and Oakland. The party was setup as an entertainment park. The concert section featured Black Eyed Peas, Don Henley and Steve Miller Band. Check out Jason Sheedy’s blog! His video montage of his JavaOne 2010 experience is quite good and contains many scenes from the party and the concerts.
