JavaOne, Day 2

The end of another long day at JavaOne - we were all pretty busy on the booth all day, apart from Tom's breaks for juggling practice.

As well as meeting an interesting set of people who visited the booth (including the lead developer on the Swing team, who knew me from a bug I'd submitted :-), Gary and I met with some people from the Java SE team that we'd dealt with before via phone/email, so it was nice to finally put faces to names.

Big news from the previous day was the demonstration of dragging a browser based JavaFX application out of the browser onto the desktop - I didn't appreciate at the time that the functionality behind that wasn't JavaFX specific - it is part of the new Java 6 update 10 functionality and is available to any applet that uses JNLP deployment descriptors, which is something I'd been playing around with for AltioLive.

That opens up an incredible number of possibilities for Altio applications: users can write AltioLive applications, deploy them via the browser and then have users drag them onto their desktops to have them available outside the browser. After years of neglecting the Java plugin, Sun have really put an incredible amount of features into the new plugin, and even if that was largely driven by JavaFX requirements, applets get the benefits of it.