My keynote was this morning, followed by a panel session and a blur of
conversations with the press, customers and developers. I could write a
book on what's gone on today, but I'm so tired after 4 incredible days
that I'm not going to be able to do it all justice.
My keynote was essentially all toy show. The first two demos were about
developers tools, the third was on sensor nets, and the fourth was the
Boeing ScanEagle experimental navigation system.
The first tool demo was about the combination of some new GUI layout
stuff we've put out in a project that we call Matisse,
together with advanced components from Swing Labs, to show how easy it
is to create desktop applications in this new world. The app we showed
the creation of was a music player.
The second tool demo was s howing how easy it has become to develope
sophisticated apps for cellphones using the NetBeans
mobility support. My favorite part came at the very end where we
downloaded the app to a cellphone and did the debugging live (including
hitting breakpoints and examining variables) on a real handset - not in
an emulator.
The third demo was some cool sensor
net stuff that combined the work of folks at Agilent, SFSU and Sun
to put very powerful and flexible sensors into San Francisco Bay. They
use cell phones to communicate from the sensor to the network, JXTA to
deal with organization, and data publishing via RSS (yes: the sensors
are technically bloggers).
The fourth demo was navigation software for the Boeing ScanEagle
automous aircraft. It's a realtime java application that essentially
acts as the pilot of the aircraft, it gets told what to observe with its
camera, and it goes there and flies an observation pattern. No human
pilot onboard or on the ground.