javaone

Overview of Mashups – Concepts, Technologies and what it all means (my JavaOne presentation)

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Sun has now uploaded the transcripts and audio from my JavaOne presentation about Mashups earlier this month. Both the PDF of the presentation, the audio and the transcript can now be found at the SDN’s JavaOne site. You need to be a member of the Sun Developer Network (SDN) to see it, but membership is free so don’t let that stop you.

The official title of the presentation is “Integration Gets All Mashed Up – Bridging Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Applications”, and it is an overview of what mashups are, what technologies are involved and how the different components fit together inside a mashup. It was a lot of work getting the presentation together, but it was well worth it since I got a lot of good feedback from people (thanks to eveybody that came and heard me speak!).

The presentation starts out with the standard (= Wikipedia) definition of mashups and then move on to describing the enabling technologies such as REST, JSON, Atom and RSS. Of course all this is from a Java perspecive since it is after all a JavaOne presentation. Next are the components of a mashup such as Mashup Builders, Widgets, Mashup Enablers and how they all fit together.

Inside a Mashup

Next I describe the the mashup programming model, which is a lightweight programming model that means that the focus is on assembling and not coding. In the end I highlight what it means to be a developer in a mashup world.

If you are in too much a hurry to go through the presentation I can give you the summary right here:

  • Mashups are all about
    • Building a situational application ad hoc
    • Reuse and remix both data and funcitonality
  • Using Mashups means that
    • You can do more in less time
    • You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
    • You are not in total control of how your applications and data will be used

If you are interested in Mashups I hope that this presentation will give you a good overview. Please take a look and a listen and let me know what you think!

What I learned at JavaOne 2007

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I am just back from a week in San Francisco at JavaOne where I was one of 12.000 geeks that got together to get to know more about the latest and greatest in Java development. Since it was almost 2 years ago I worked full time with Java development this almost felt like a trip back in time for me, back to the time when Java was equal to my professional life, and what I have worked with the last few years (Web 2.0, mashups, web scraping etc) is still considered new and exotic in the Java world.

It was also very interesting for me to compare JavaOne with the Web 2.0 Expo that I attended a few weeks ago. JavaOne is almost strictly for developers that are using a mature technology that has not really taken any real leaps lately. The Web 2.0 Expo was for both techies and business people and it looking forward at new technologies and business oppertunities.

Keynotes and General Sessions
Most of the Keynotes and the General Sessions were also about running Java on all kinds of devices (cell phones, ATMs etc) and generally about how great Java is, so nothing new there. But there were a few things that caught my eye:

  • JavaFX Script – Sun has decided to take up the fight with Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash, unfourtunatly they decided to give it a name that most people will confuse with “JavaScript” and Adobe’s “Flex” (just try saying JavaFX Script 10 times quickly). This is a very interesting move since it suddenly makes it easy for the whole Java community to develop Rich Internet Applications. This and Silverlight has the potential to make the web a much more interesting place.
  • Netbeans 6 – There was a quite impressive demo of Netbeans 6 and how it can be used for programming Ruby on Rails, much better than RadRails I am using now. Of course it was a demo and I havent had time to test the Netbeans 6 preview yet, but as soon as I have to dig down into Rails again Netbeans is my choice.
  • Blu-ray – There was some semi-desperat plees (=competitions) to get Java developers involved in the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD fight. Sun is squarly behind Blu-ray (they mentioned that it ran Java about 100 times). The Blu-ray demos were cool, but personally I just want one format to win quickly so I know what player to buy.

Java and Web 2.0
Most of the presentations were of course about hardcore Java stuff, and I skipped those. Instead I went to all presentations about Mashups, RSS, Atom and REST (acctually I held a presentation about Mashups myself, more about that in a later post). It is pretty clear that all the Web 2.0 technologies are viewed as some distant hype by most of the Java community.

The only really cool thing I saw in regards to Java and Mashups was a couple of demos of jMaki. It is a project developed by Sun and it is basically a framework where java developers can easily program Mashups. The great thing was what is called the “Glue” which is an event bus that enables widgets from different providers like Yahoo and Dojo. jMaki has a great future if it ever moves into the Enterprise world and it could be a real step forward for both Java and Web 2.0.

Another interesting Sun research project is Project Caroline that enables java developers to control all resouces from the code, ie create new server instances on the fly, set up new file systems etc etc. If this ever moves beyond just being a half implemented research project it could open up to a lot of competition for Amazons S3 and EC2.