Blogging can be hard work. Especially if you are trying to provide timely postings from an on-going event (JavaOne in my case). And especially if your computer decides not to cooperate with the conference Wifi access points (and you are too lazy to type the postings with your N800 Internet Tablet). And especially if the blog site login seems to not work when you finally get the network connection working late night in the hotel. My apologies for the delayed report from Monday....

The forthcoming NetBeans version (6.0) was showcased in a number of presentations. A number of new features in the coming NetBeans Mobility (used to be Mobility Pack) version:

• Completely rewritten visual designer
• Device database API
• Advanced build system (based on Ant)
• Deployment on more devices
• Java ME CLDC and CDC in one package

Profiling is not available for mobile devices, unfortunately. 

Demonstrations of the Mobility tools included matching NetBeans with Ikivo Animator and Mobile Complete's DeviceAnywhere testing service. Cool stuff. In fact the Ikivo Animator and the resulting SVG animations reminded me of Flash Lite animations. There was not much difference between the results or in the workflow.

We should be expecting some cool Open Source announcements by Sun in Tuesday's JavaOne keynote. Or at least this is the feeling I am getting during the CommunityOne presentations in San Francisco today. This might be an understatement as one of the presenters was pretty particular that something big is going to get announced and we should better not miss the Tuesday's keynote.

My guess is that the announcement will be related to opening the Class libraries also, as that part of the Java SE environment was not open sourced in last November like for Java ME (only the VM implementation was). It is good to stress that Sun open sourcing Java means open sourcing the implementation, not the language, API specifications, nor TCKs.

[Note: CommunityOne is a new event organized by Sun on the day before JavaOne, where the presentations focus on open source, development tools (NetBeans) and a number of community projects around Java.]

During the presentation on OpenJDK it was told that buildable OpenJDK packages will be available in May-June time frame. First the source will be available in tar/zip-files, but they will later move to Mercurial source code repository. Getting the OpenJDK has taken this long as there has been 6.5 million lines of code, and legal clearance has been required for all of them. Still there will be a number of binary plugs along the first release, as Sun does not have copyright to all of the code and hence they cannot be released under GPL. (The encumbered parts include GUI components, imaging, encryption - JCE, and graphics rendering - Sun expects developers quickly to develop OS modules which can then replace these binary plugs.)

On the Mobile and Embedded side, the phoneME Feature (for mass-market phones) and phoneME Advanced (for Smart Phones) were outlined briefly and the presenter waved also Nokia N800 in his hands saying that OS Java implementation based on phoneME Advance is available for that device, even if the device does not contain Java out-of-the-box.

Also check Project Orbit which is a JavaME viewer for Laszlo content ("Laszlo is platform-independent zero-download AJAX-style Web content integrating XML and JavaScript for rich online experiences").