[URL=http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/]Articles Index[/URL]

    
Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) technologies form the foundation for building and deploying all kinds of Java applications, from simple applets to complex enterprise-class programs to next-generation web technologies.

The Java SE track at the 2007 JavaOne conference consists of highly technical talks, many including code examples, that show how to use the core Java platform technologies to their fullest, allowing you to build robust, scalable, portable applications. Among the topics in this year's JavaOne conference are the following:   

Core language and APIs
Security
I/O
Networking
Utilities
Concurrency
Garbage collection
Monitoring and management
Java runtime environments (JREs)
Open sourcing of Java SE
Case studies
Performance
Cool stuff that shows innovation on the platform
In addition, parallel tracks -- such as the Open Source track, the Services and Integration track, and the Next Generation Web track -- offer interesting sessions for Java developers. And then there are [URL=http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/javauniversity.jsp]Java University[/URL], [URL=http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/netbeansday.jsp]NetBeans Software Day[/URL], [URL=http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/]CommunityOne[/URL], and the [URL=http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/pavilion/index.jsp]JavaOne Pavilion[/URL], all of which are part of the JavaOne conference experience and offer learning opportunities for Java developers.

Here are 10 must-see destinations for Java SE developers at the 2007 JavaOne conference. Note: The schedule of sessions and speakers is subject to change, so check the [URL=http://www28.cplan.com/cc158/sessions_catalog.jsp]content catalog[/URL] periodically.

Java Puzzlers, Episode VI: The Phantom-Reference Menace/Attack of the Clone/Revenge of the Shift (TS-2707)
Speakers: Joshua Bloch, Google, Inc.; William Pugh, University of Maryland

This session was extremely popular last year, largely due to its game-show format and the challenge it presents to Conference attendees.  

From the abstract: "Josh Bloch and special guest star Bill Pugh present yet another installment in the continuing saga of Java Puzzlers, consisting of eight more programming puzzles for your entertainment and enlightenment. The format keeps you on your toes while the puzzles teach you about the subtleties of the Java programming language and its core libraries. Anyone with a working knowledge of the language will be able to understand the puzzles, but even the most seasoned veterans will be challenged. The lessons you take from this session are directly applicable to your programs and designs. Some of the jokes may even be funny. If you loathed Episodes I-V, you'll detest Episode VI. Come early, because overripe fruit will, as usual, be given to the first 50 attendees."

How to Hack in the OpenJDK Project (TS-2800)
Speaker: Mark Reinhold, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

OpenJDK is Sun's open-source Java Development Kit (JDK), in essence an implementation of the Java SE specification defined in the Java Community Process program. The [URL=http://community.java.net/openjdk/]OpenJDK community[/URL] is a collection of projects focused on experimentation and evolution of the JDK platform.

From the abstract: "This session demonstrates how to build the OpenJDK project, run it, and hack on it. If you are interested in contributing to the future of the Java platform, this is a great session to attend. You'll learn the basics of the Mercurial source code management system, the JDK software build system, and the OpenJDK project's contribution process. The presenters intend to make several nontrivial changes to the OpenJDK code base live on stage."

Java Programming Language Features in JDK Release 7 (BOF-2899)
Speakers: Peter von der Ahé and Alex Buckley, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The JavaOne conference is known not only for its technical sessions but also for its Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) get-togethers, which encourage dialogue among Conference attendees. In this BOF session, you can ask the compiler team questions about language features planned for JDK release 7. If you want to give input to the programmers behind the JDK, or you're just curious as to what JDK 7 will contain, be sure to drop by this BOF and see what JDK 7 has to offer.

Java Technology Generics and Collections: Tools for Productivity (TS-2890)
Speakers: Maurice Naftalin, Morningside Light Ltd.; Philip Wadler, University of Edinburgh

Every Java programmer needs to understand generics, but this talk also includes topics on using these APIs in parallel processing, a must-know for programming in a multicore world.

From the abstract: "This presentation, based on the book Java Generics and Collections (O'Reilly), answers the questions that developers need to understand to make productive use of generics and collections. Attendees should be practicing programmers using the Java programming language, should be acquainted with the basic ideas of generics, and should have written code using collections...

"Increasingly, mainstream developers using the Java programming language are going to need to understand concurrency, driven by the changing economics of hardware design, which now favor parallel operation of multiple cores and multiple processors over increasing clock speeds. For many programs, increasing efficiency will now mean parallelization, and programmers using the Java programming language are well equipped to take advantage of this, if they understand the concurrent collections introduced in [J2SE 5.0] technology and extended in [Java SE 6] technology. The presentation shows the ideas behind the concurrent collections and the way in which their mechanisms for thread safety affect their behavior under concurrent modification."

Effective Java Reloaded: This Time It's for Real (TS-2689)
Speaker: Joshua Bloch, Google, Inc.

Effective Java is, without a doubt, one of the most influential programming books ever written. Readers are eagerly awaiting the release of the second edition. This session appears to be a continuation of last year's session, which was standing room only.

From the abstract: "It's been more than five years since Effective Java was released. The Java platform has evolved, and we've learned more about how to use it to best effect. This session covers new material added to the second edition, which makes its debut at this Conference. The presentation, which should be useful to every working programmer, contains plenty of new material that was not covered in the 2006 session."

Effective Concurrency for the Java Platform (TS-2388)
Speaker: Brian Goetz, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

As mentioned earlier, Java programming in a multicore world is going to be a key topic in the years to come. However, there's a big difference between effective parallel programming and simply multithreading your applications. This talk promises to fill the gap.

From the abstract: "The Java programming language has turned a generation of application programmers into concurrent programmers through its direct support of multithreading. However, the concurrency primitives provided by the Java programming language are just that: primitive. With them, you can build whatever concurrency constructs you need, but doing so takes great care, because concurrent programming poses many traps for the unwary. Based on the principles in the best-selling Java Concurrency in Practice and structured with the 'bite-size item' style of Effective Java, this talk focuses on design techniques that will help you create correct and maintainable concurrent code."

Meet the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) Core Libraries Engineering Team (BOF-2943)
Speakers: Sherman Shen and Iris Clark, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Attend this BOF session to meet the engineers responsible for the Java SE core libraries, including java.lang, java.io, java.nio, java.util, and the character converters. .

The team will speak briefly about what team members have done lately and what they plan to do. The session also covers the team's goals for open-source contributions and describes ideas for areas in which submissions are welcome, along with the anticipated technical and procedural challenges.

A Lock-Free HashTable (TS-2862)
Speakers: Cliff Click and Michael Wolf, Azul Systems

HashTable is arguably the collection that many developers use the most in Java programming, so any access time that can be shaved off its operations in a multithreaded environment would be worth its weight in gold.

From the abstract: "This session presents a totally lock-free hashtable with extremely low-cost and near perfect scaling. [Applications that are used to accessing the thread-safe Hashtable (readers)] pay no more than [the non-thread-safe] HashMap readers: just the cost of computing the hash, loading and comparing the key, and returning the value. Writers must use AtomicUpdate instead of a simple assignment but otherwise pay the same as readers. In particular, there is no required order between loads and stores; correctness is assured, no matter how the hardware orders memory operations. A state-based technique demonstrates the correctness of the algorithm. This novel approach is very straightforward and much easier to understand than the usual 'happens-before' memory-order-based reasoning."

Testing Concurrent Software (TS-2220)
Speakers: Cliff Click, Azul Systems; Brian Goetz, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; William Pugh, Univ. of Maryland

The abstract for this session starts off by stating that "Testing concurrent software is hard." That's putting it mildly. If you've ever run into a race condition, a deadlock, or a host of other multithreading gotchas, you've probably spent an entire afternoon abandoning your debugger and backing down to 20 or 30 System.out.println() to figure out what's going on.

From the abstract: "This presentation describes some of the basic challenges in testing concurrent software, describes how frameworks such as TestNG can be used to perform multithreaded tests, and examines some new open-source testing frameworks that make it ever easier to create and control the threads needed to test concurrent software and reliably find faults through testing that would normally occur only sporadically through rare thread interleavings. It also discusses how to think about and design unit tests for concurrent software... The session covers the approaches used by the JSR 166 expert group to test the java.util.concurrent classes, the range of environments in which these tests were run, and ways in which the test results conditioned the development of the code."

High-Performance Java Technology in a Multicore World (TS-2885)
Speakers: David Dagastine and Paul Hohensee, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Again, don't underestimate the importance of programming for multicore systems. The latest chips this year may contain only two or four cores, but five years from now, we could be delegating asynchronous tasks directly to processor cores through the operating system APIs.

From the abstract: "This presentation discusses the issues facing Java and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) technologies in a computing world quickly moving toward multiple-core CPU solutions. It reviews current and planned multicore technologies from Sun, Intel, AMD, and others and describes relevant JVM technology requirements and performance optimizations in detail. It also discusses changes, including example code, in Java technology-based applications to take advantage of multicore platforms. A short demonstration shows how to solve common performance and scalability bottlenecks through JVM software tuning."
These and a host of other sessions should make the 2007 JavaOne conference a truly interesting and enriching experience for any type of Java developer.