On Sunday evening, Oct. 2, at the JavaOne Open House, Oracle welcomed and celebrated the 2011 Duke's Choice Award winners, all talented developers who have demonstrated extreme innovation in the creation of Java-powered applications.

Drum roll: And the winners are...

• Arquillian Project - The Arquillian project simplifies integration testing for Java-based applications. It provides an easy mechanism for developers to test application code inside a remote or embedded container, or by interacting as a client of the container.

• dooApp - Infiltrea is an end-to-end solution, built with JavaFX and Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), designed for green building professionals whose job is to measure the air tightness of buildings.

• Inductive Automation - Ignition is a Java-based web application that includes a business scorecard to integrate different manufacturing machines using a central web-server. It creates systems that cover the full spectrum between Human Machine Interface (HMI), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES), enabling rapid project development and deployment.

• Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) jHome - A complete home automation API open-source for Glassfish/Java EE, enabling developers to control anything in their homes such as lamps, LED lights, and coffee machines.

• JFrog - JFrog's Artifactory is the world's first binary repository manager. Built with the Content Repository API for Java (JCR) specification, it is helping to change the way developers build and manage software modules by delivering high concurrency and unmatched data integrity.

• JRebel - JRebel is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) plug-in that enables Java developers to instantly see any code change made to an application. It allows developers to skip the build and redeploy phases and has prevented 39 million redeploys.

• LMAX - The LMAX Disruptor is a multi-threaded, open-source concurrent programming framework designed for high-performance and low-latency transaction processing. Part of LMAX's Java-based trading platform, the LMAX Disruptor replaces and outperforms java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue by up to 80 times.

• Rockwell Automation - Rockwell Automation is creating its next generation, Java-enabled HMI device line of products that will allow for the automated communication and exchange of data to factory floor lines.

• Sodbeans Project - The Sodbeans Project is an open-source, NetBeans-based module suite designed to enhance accessibility for the blind in modern programming environments. The NetBeans module suite includes a new programming language designed for ease-of-use, a text-to-speech engine designed to make NetBeans compatible with screen readers on multiple platforms and a number of features designed to make programming easier for the blind.

• The Netty Project - The Netty Project is a Java-based new I/O (NIO) client server framework that enables quick and easy development of network applications. It greatly simplifies and streamlines network programming such as TCP and UDP socket server.

Congratulations to all!

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 java.net article, rich in practical resources, by IBM India Labs’ Sathiskumar Palaniappan, Kavitha Varadarajan, and Jayashree Viswanathan, explores the challenge of writing code in a way that that effectively makes use of the resources of modern multicore processors and multiprocessor servers.

As the article states:

“Many server applications, such as Web servers, application servers, database servers, file servers, and mail servers, maintain worker queues and thread pools to handle large numbers of short tasks that arrive from remote sources. In general, a ‘worker queue’ holds all the short tasks that need to be executed, and the threads in the thread pool retrieve the tasks from the worker queue and complete the tasks.

Since multiple threads act on the worker queue, adding tasks to and deleting tasks from the worker queue needs to be synchronized, which introduces contention in the worker queue.”

The article goes on to explain ways that developers can reduce contention by maintaining one queue per thread. It also demonstrates a work-stealing technique that helps in effectively utilizing the CPU in multicore systems.

Read the rest of the article here.