JavaOne Day 1 - JRubyOnRails and JavaFX

I'm back home after the first day of my first JavaOne and I feel incredibly good. Seeing these thousands of geeks (just like me :)) trying to suck in as much info as they can, while talking about all these cool things that "normal" beings would not even remotely understand. Feels like a geek heaven :))

Overall the day was pretty interesting:

1. I was happy to meet my team mate Matthew in person.
2. The DJ that warmed up the crowd before the keynote, reminded me how much I like electronic music from which I got side tracked from for unknown reason. I should blame my friend Monicka influencing me with all that good jazz that she was loading me up with lately.
3. The keynote was pretty good. IMO I think that Apple does a better job at orchestrating keynotes so that they feel little more exciting though (at least from what I saw online). I'm not saying that it was boring or anything like that, just stating that there is still some space for improvements. ;-)
4. OpenJDK is out - good job!
5. JavaFX - think Flash/Flex/Silverlight/AJAX "killer" :) - new technology announced today during the keynote, looks promising. From what I saw I think that this technology has a great potential. Based on experience I got while helping out on the zoom23.com project, I see that AJAX/DHTML has its limits. When creating RIA it is very easy to reach those limits and start to struggle performance-wise. I know that Flash is out there, but I think there are valid reasons why not to use Flash. If JavaFX delivers on its promise, I'd be up to checking out how JavaFX can be leveraged at www.zoom23.com. Rama, are you planting ideas about how/where to use JavaFX at .sun.com? :)
6. The other major thing that change the way I look at the world today was the JRuby on Rails session. I've been keeping an eye on JRuby for some time now, but I had a feeling that it was not ready yet, or at least not ready for the enterprise. How wrong I was! During the session Charlie and Thomas (a.k.a. JRuby guys) demoed deploying a simple JRoR app as a war to Glassfish app server. Amazing! I have to play with this and see how I can sneak the JRoR into .sun.com (I have a secret plan already! 8-) ). Also the backend of zoom23.com could greatly benefit from tighter integration of the RoR admin app and Java based importers. Hey zoom23 guys, how would you like running zManager and the importers in one JVM? I think that it would be pretty interesting!
7. I wish Java had closures already! Come on people, hurry up with these, otherwise it'll be too late.
8. The other session and hands on labs that I attended were beyond disappointment. I was bored to tears!

Off to bed, to recharge and continue tomorrow.