JavaOne2008. A day for applets and reporting

If I can conclude anything about JavaOne2008 on Wednesday it's that the Java community is once again thinking about Java Applets (especially if you like JavaFX), the second thing is that there is a big drive to produce highly interactive reporting tools.

We met a number of Sun Microsystems staff today, some we expected to meet and other by chance. I asked Ethan Nicholas who works on the Java JVM kernel if it was possible to get two applets to communicate with each other without using JavaScript and guess what, it may not be a simple task (the question was asked during our talk yesterday).

Jim's thoughts for versions of Java earlier than 1.6u10 would be to use static variables/classes, the problem with this approach is that both applets need to be aware of each other and would be tightly coupled, not Web 2.0 at all. At least this would have worked though.

With the delivery of Java 1.6u10 it's going to be even harder for Applets to communicate in a browser as each Applet will run in its own virtual machine and so globally available static classes are not an option, so it's back to JavaScript - on the plus side Ethan appears keen on the idea of making this happen. I think a solution is needed if Java Applets are to be used on the desktop as demonstrated in one of the key note talks. The standard for desktop applications communicating has been set by Microsoft and so Java will need an equivalent communication mechanism for desktop applications to really succeed, and it needs to ensure applications are loosely coupled.

I regret not seeing the talk on JavaFX where dropping widgets onto the desktop was shown and it seems that it was not made clear during the talk that this ability to drag an applet to the desktop was a plugin feature and not JavaFX. Jim, Tom and I had to explain this several times to people visiting the booth.

I'm going to try and spend the day tomorrow looking at all the different reporting tools, there's a great fit between RIA and reporting, and there are lots of possible products to choose from it's just identify how easily AltioLive could integrate with different reporting products.