JavaOne Treasures

My company sent 6 folks to JavaOne and today was the first of many recap/regurgitation of JavaOne goodness. Mylyn a tool the CFML community has already been introduced to by some fellow bloggers is, of course, making a big splash in the Java community as well. Since I have had a large amount of experience with it I got the chance to help present the plugin to everyone, which was fun to see it get a bigger response. Next my Java counter part talked about JSF and blabbered a bit about the JSF2.0 spec, hype or real we'll see I suppose.

The next recap was of a tool that everyone, EVERYONE, should have in their toolbelt. The tool is best used with Java 6 but can hook in with Java 5 and even 1.4 a little. The tool is free; VisualVM and can, with Java 6, visually show you all sorts of stats on what is running in your JVM. It can get down to how many of what classes you have in memory. Its also plugable and they already have a cool plugin to show a histogram of your GC which can be very interesting! The tool is at RC1 right now and is a must for anyone doing any sort of development on the Java platform.

Next Hot topics/Buzz was presented. It was cool to see Flex get a mention, gave me a chance to pimp ColdFusion as well as talk about BlazeDS. Groovy was of course brought up and we had a short discussion of it. In the same light Ruby and other dynamic languages (funny not CFML) were brought interesting missing from the list was Scala which I thought had some buzz at JavaOne from other accounts. Selenium got a mention and seems to be growing as an accepted tool in many communities now, again a good thing to see. I was really hoping JavaFX would get more than a 5 second mention but I expect much more about JavaFX over the next couple of months, again vapor or reality...we'll see. Finally 2 debugging tools were talked about Fiddler, and Omniscient. Omniscient looks particularly interesting as it essentially records your applications stacks and allows you to replay something to allow you to do intensive root cuase analysis on a bug, very cool stuff.

Overall it was an excellent recap with loads of good tips and information and I am really looking forward to playing with Omniscient and VisualVM as I start doing more and more with OpenBD.