JavaOne Keynote

Had the keynote by Jonathan Swartz (spelling is wrong, deal with it :P) this morning. Very marketing oriented but interesting none-the-less. He predicts that the car industry will be the next place Java technology really takes off (mobile phones being the current boom) and he’s quite probably right but I think it will take a long time for those features to filter down into the general populace rather than just being in BMW’s. Some interesting stuff in the followups as well on Java 1.5 or as it’s now to be called Java 5.0. Firstly obviously the numbering change is interesting and long overdue. It’s good to have Java use a more standard numbering scheme. It has just occurred to me however that it will break a lot of code (including some of ours) which looks for Java 1.4 and above. Code that checks for it like: javaVersion.startsWith(“1.4”) is stuffed but so is code that parses each number and then only checks that the second digit is greater than 3 (which is the trap we fall into from time to time). Oh well, serves people right for writing sloppy code. I think I’m finally interested in using Java 5.0 now too. Not sure why exactly, but seeing some of the code examples using the new features just seems to clean up code a lot. There was other interesting stuff too but I need to head off to another session.