In today’s Java Community Keynote, Oracle honored recipients of this year’s Duke’s Choice awards for innovation including the London Java Community for its innovative Adopt a JSR program. According to group co-founder Martijn Verburg, “developers felt isolated from those who created the standards, so we complained via blogs and social media. We were told maybe we should join.” Members of the London Java Community joined the JCP and subsequently instituted adoptajsr.org. Oracle has been keen to show it is moving Java standards into an open, collaborative environment that is also transparent.
Embedded Java has also taken center stage as Paul Perrone of Perrone Robotics was brought on to show off new programmable robotic kits targeting the hobbyist market. The embedded market is important to Oracle. Nandini Ramani, who oversees Java Client and Mobile Platforms told infoQ that “Oracle is leading the charge in this space.” Oracle hopes that with Java Embedded suite and the middleware stack bundled with Glassfish, it can reach a potential 10 Million new users that can develop for embedded.
A surprise highlight came when James Gosling took the stage to show off Liquid Robotics’ new robot, Wave Glider, that harnesses ocean wave energy. According to Gosling, “It has a sort of surfboard attached (by a cable 7 meters long) to this thing with wings.” The surfboard floats and wave motion causes the wings below to act like a motor that generates sustainable energy. Solar cells are placed on top along with sensors that can be used for anything from sampling water chemistry and warning if water pollution, to weather monitoring and marine mammal counts. While the current fleet of 150 robots runs microcontrollers with embedded C, new robots will utilize an ARM processor running Linux and JDK7. Robot nodes are networked and use a publish/subscribe model to communicate. In that way nodes can form clusters to create a mesh of sensors over large areas. The presentation can be viewed at the JavaOne Keynote page.
Other recipients include the Apache Hadoop project, which is written in Java, Jelastic, a Java PaaS that offers a one-click port to the cloud solution, and AgroSense, an open source farm information management system built in Java and the NetBeans platform. The awards also highlighted user involvement in a big way. In addition to the London Java Community, an award was bestowed on Duchess, which fosters the participation of women in the Java community worldwide. The group has more than 500 members in 60 countries. And this year’s student winner, Ram Kashyap, is the founder and president of the Nokia Student Network. Other recipients this year include MASE Integrated Console Environment (MICE) in use at NATO, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and E-learning specialist Parleys.com.