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Monday morning's Technical Keynote began with Doug Fisher, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Software and Services Group’s System Software Division, Intel. Fisher and a number of Intel colleagues reviewed Intel’s long association with Java, and their collaborative work with Oracle to optimize the Java platform (for both the JVM and Fusion Middleware) on Intel hardware.

From there, Ashok Joshi, Senior Director of Development NoSQL Database, briefly discussed performance tuning with Intel of the newly announced Oracle NoSQL Database product.

From Evolution to Revolution: Java 7 to Java 8

Following Joshi, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, reviewed the history of Java 7, and its “Plan B” paradigm of including Project Coin (JSR 334), InvokeDynamic (JSR 292), and the Fork/Join Framework in the just-released Java 7, while incorporating Project Jigsaw and Project Lambda in the upcoming Java 8. Reinhold then explored the evolutionary benefits of these key new features of the Java 7 release -- offering both greater ease of development, and significant performance benefits. “Not only are these features available in Java 7 today,” noted Reinhold, “but as of last week, they are now supported in all three of the major Java IDEs.”

Reinhold next detailed plans for the upcoming Java 8 release, which promises more revolutionary features beyond the evolutionary offerings of Java 7. Project Lambda (JSR 335) will bring closures to the Java programming language. And Project Jigsaw (JSR TBD) aims to define a standard module system -- not just for application code, but for the platform itself.

JavaFX 2.0 is Here!

Richard Bair, Chief Architect, Client Java Platform, Oracle, then dove into the official debut of JavaFX 2.0, along with some stunning demos of the new facility, presented by several colleagues. Java FX 2.0 is Oracle’s premier development environment for rich client applications. Bair emphasized that JavaFX 2.0 was designed to offer:

Cross Platform
Leverage Java
Advanced Tooling
Developer Productivity
Amazing User Interfaces.

“We naturally want user interfaces that look good and work well,” said Bair. “It used to be just eye candy, but now it’s becoming a required feature for the things we write. We’re announcing today the general availability of JavaFX 2.0, at JavaFX.com. We think this is going to be a really big deal in the industry.”

An important aspect of any UI technology is a good visual development tool, and Bair next announced early access for the JavaFX Scene Builder, which will first be made available to select partners, then expanded to a general beta, and then a full release. But for those at JavaOne, an early build of the tool will be running and available for demo at the DEMOgrounds.

A series of stunning demos -- several of them BSD licensed caused much enthusiasm -- then took JavaFX 2.0 out for a spin, and clearly showed the possibilities and potentials of the new release -- including animated 3D audio EQ mapping, and a navigable 3D virtual room that featured live video of Oracle colleague Jasper Potts displayed on a wall monitor, along with real-time mimicking of Potts’ movements by a virtual Java Duke figure.

Bair noted that there are over 50 JavaFX sessions at JavaOne, and said that for anyone who attended all of them -- “I’ll buy you dinner!”

Moving Java EE into the Cloud

From there, Linda DeMichiel, Java EE 7 Specification Lead, explored the upcoming Java EE 7 release. “What’s new with the Java EE platform?” asked DeMichiel. “We’re moving Java EE into the Cloud. Our focus on this release is providing support for Platform as a Service. We want to provide a way for customers and users of the platform to leverage public, private and hybrid clouds. With Java EE 7, our focus is on the platform itself as a service, which can be leveraged in cloud environments.”

DeMichiel’s colleague, Arun Gupta, then demonstrated deployment of a Java EE application as a PaaS, using Glassfish 4.0. Both the application and instructions on how to replicate the demo are available online.

More Java Cards than People?

Lastly, Hinkmond Wong, of Oracle’s Java Embedded group, covered the latest in mobile and embedded Java, noting the three billion Java enabled phones and five billion Java Cards in the world today. “There are about 6.5 billion people in the world,” noted Wong, “and five billion Java Cards.”

2011 saw the introduction of Near Field Communication (NFC) payment system, including e-Passport in Java ME, allowing for mobile-to-mobile and machine-to-machine transactions with embedded security. Wong detailed the many new Java ME releases for 2011, along with several mobile and embedded technology demos—from cell phones to Blu-ray players.

The overflow crowd left the opening technical keynote energized – a real good start to this JavaOne!

Learn More:

Java 7 Features:
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/

Java SE 7 Features and Enhancements:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/jdk7-relnotes-418459.html

A Look at Java 7's New Features:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/java7-features.html

Contribute to JDK 8:
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/
http://jdk8.java.net/

JavaFX:
http://javafx.com/
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/index.html

Java EE at a Glance:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaee/overview/index.html

Java for Mobile Devices:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javame/javamobile/overview/getstarted/index.html

Oracle NoSQL Database:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html

A new article by Java Champion Adam Bien, now up on otn/java, titled “Integration Testing for Java EE,” explores the intricacies of integration testing, which is done after a successful execution of unit tests, which however, will often fail. According to Bien, unit tests are fast and fine-grained while integration tests are slow and coarse-grained.

From the article:

“Testing everything inside an embedded container is convenient but unproductive. Java EE 6 components are annotated Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) and can be easily unit tested and mocked out (see my previous article, “Unit Testing for Java EE.") with Java SE tools such as JUnit, TestNG, or Mockito. Using an embedded container to test your business logic is not only unproductive, but it is also conceptually wrong. Unit tests should validate your business logic, not the container behavior. Also, the majority of integration tests could be easily performed with a local EntityManager (see Listing 1) or a mocked-out container infrastructure. Only a fraction of all integration tests can be beneficially implemented with embeddable containers or test frameworks such as Arquillian.”

Read the complete article here.

A new article, titled “Unit Testing for Java EE,” by Java Champion Adam Bien, is up on otn/java’s front page. Bien points out that too many developers believe that testing Java EE applications is too hard, inconvenient, or complex, something that has not been true since the advent of Java EE 5 more than five years ago.

Bien explains: “There is nothing special about unit testing Java EE 6 applications. You only have to add the JUnit library into your pom.xml file (see Listing 5) and put your classes into the src/test/java directory. All JUnit tests will be executed automatically during the standard Maven lifecycle: mvn clean install.”

He goes on to make use of “Mockito” an easy-to-use, open source mocking library. Bien writes:

“Mockito is able to create ‘smart proxies’ (a.k.a. mocks) from classes or interfaces. These proxies do not come with any behavior, but they are still perfectly usable. You can invoke methods, but will get the default values, or null, back. The behavior of the mocks can be recorded after their creation with when(mock.getAnswer()).then(42) syntax.

Mockito is perfectly suitable for ‘simulating’ any inconvenient classes, resources, or services. You can start with Mockito just by knowing a single class org.mockito.Mockito. The when-then ‘domain specific language’ is composed of static methods from the Mockito class. The org.mockito.Mockito class is well documented. In fact, the whole documentation set was generated from the JavaDoc markup in the org.mockito.Mockito class.”

Read the complete article here.