Keynote and Concurrent programming.

The first keynote was all about JavaFX. Since it's just released last week this was probably the first big presentation of it. Because I've followed JavaFX really really closely for the past months, I didn't hear anything new in the keynote. They did surprise me with one thing however, they had a running JavaFX application on a mobile. Nice :-) Just a few more months before we can try that out too. Anyway, the presentation was done nicely with really good looking demo's. The second part of the keynote was done my IBM about RFID. All conference passes are RFID tagged and they do some tracking with it, and in the keynote they showed how. Interesting, but the talk about the software was really complex with half a million different products stuffed in it. Not really my thing.

Next was about parallel programming. Starting with the pre Java 5 way of doing concurrency, and the new Executor framework in Java 5, Brian gave a good overview of the problems you'll run into with those approaches. The rest of the talk was about the new parallel programming support in Java 7. It was the first time I saw it, and I'm impressed by it. It makes parallel programming much more easy but also much more efficient. Definitively going to try it out at home.