In addition to Richard’s talk, Chet Haase and Hans Muller gave a great talk summarizing the state of Swing and its near future. Big take-aways for me from their talk was that Sun is really energized about solving a lot of the problems we’ve started to take for granted as being part of Java desktop (big JRE, slow start-up time, poor support for audio and media, etc.). Very exciting to see Java 1.6 give so much to desktop Java and see an ambitious plan for 1.7.
We also had a great Q&A session with Chet, Shannon Hickey, Brian Beck (Swing Team Manager), Richard Bair, Chris Campbell, Dmitri Trembovetski (Java2D engineer), and Andrey Pikalev (manager of Russia AWT team) — and special guest Mike Swingler from Apple’s Java Desktop team. Mike was at the show as an attendee and contributed a great deal to the panel answering OS X specific questions and giving input during the sessions as well.
The big highlights of day one was seeing a great vision for Mustang from Chet and Hans in addition to finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for usable stuff from SwingLabs, after years of knowing there was good stuff in there but not knowing where to begin, etc. I have high hopes for the forthcoming Dev Packs. I was a little disappointed that Richard was advocating that other folks can pick and choose from SwingLabs and create their own “Pack Distributions” — because I want FEWER unnecessary choices in my life, not more — but still, very cool stuff.
The party at the end of the day was a great chance to chat up a lot of folks I hadn’t seen for a while as the event organizer it may be a bit self-serving to say there was a positive buzz in the air, I am pleasantly surprised to see all the energy and excitement in this space. I’m very much looking forward to Day Two. And I’m so happy Nimbus is finally out of the bag.
Ben Galbraith 