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.

Zoom23 Launched!

In October of this year I joined a very interesting project that I've been contributing all of my free time to. The project is called Zoom23 and can be found at www.zoom23.com.

The basic idea is very simple: "Reinvent online shopping".

These days you can buy almost anything online, if not everything. But the online shopping experience is far from shopping in brick and mortar stores. This is especially true if all you want is just to browse products, hoping that something will catch your eye. It is no fun to be clicking through pages of products and being flooded with lots of text that you don't really care for, when all you want is to have a look. Zoom23 displays all items in a slide show format, which is a pretty exceptional approach to displaying products online.

The second new experience that Zoom23 brings are social networking features that enhances the shopping experience. No longer will you be alone when shopping online. Zoom23 will enable you to share your favorite items and give recommendations to other through voting on items and sharing personal slide shows.

Do you often shop online at Amazon, Ebay or Yahoo? Then you can enjoy all the benefits of these stores while having unified access to all the products displayed in a unique way. This is because all of the products on Zoom23 come from these three popular online stores, with more stores to come in the future.

There is still a lot of work to be done especially in adding more social networking features, higher data quality and tighter integration with the original online store, but already now you can go to www.zoom23.com and easily shop for Christmas presents for your family and friends.

I'll come back to this project in the future and will write a little about all the Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP and Ajax that we used to put the site together.