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At the JavaDeus Sun promoted OpenSolaris and we got Live CDs of it. I thought about looking at OpenSolaris for quite a while and with the CD in my hands there was no excuse anymore. So, I tried out the live CD and was surprised that the distro handles hardware quite well and OpenSolaris is fast. But now, I don’t want to write about OpenSolaris, instead I want to write about the most visible thing of OpenSolaris: the Nimbus Look&Feel. Wow!

Don’t get me wrong, I always like the Nimbus look. However, I have never thought that Nimbus looks so good for a whole Desktop. The colors look smooth, the look is sexy, and for the first time I really like the Look&Feel of Gnome. The next time I am installing Ubuntu, I will definitely switch from the brown to the cool theme. I would really love to see a Nimbus KDE theme. Here a screenshot, so you know what I am talking about:

More screenshots can be found here.

Nimbus alone is worth exploring the Live CD.

I attended yesterday the JavaDeus in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, and I have to say I was quite surprised; very professional, interesting, and quite a fun. I met old friends and talked with a lot of interesting people about the upcoming JavaFX and the Open Source Strategy. For me the most interesting sessions were Suns Open Source Strategy by Reggie Hutcherson, the Technology Demos by the US Team, and Sun Spots by Manfred Bortenschlager.

After talking with the Sun people I am really looking forward to the JavaFX SDK preview release in July. Hopefully, the mobility SDK will follow soon. I have to admit I am getting excited about JavaFX …

Some interesting facts:

Locations:	FH St. Pölten (quite a nice location)
Hosts:	FH St. Pölten, Sun Microsystems Austria, and Partners
Conferees:	nearly 600 (expected 150!)
Sessions:	20

Like I wrote in previous blog entries I also was at the JAX this year. I got the feeling that the JAX was all about Marketing, Business, and Enterprise xxx (enter what you want here). JavaDeus was the opposite. Talking about (new) technologies, Java, the concerns, and expectations, and so forth. This was really refreshing compared to the Jax advertising.

Thanks again to the hosts, I am definetley coming again next year. Btw. slides will be available soon!

Update:

A friend of mine read this blog entry and showed me some decompiled Java where the compiler actually replaced the + operator. I played around with some Java compilation/decompilation and it seems that the compiler replaces the + operator with either StringBuilder or creating a new static String (e.g. “JavaDeus ” + 2008 would be compiled to “JavaDeus 2008″. Some examples can be found here. Jad files can be viewed with any text editor.

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First, I have to say I don’t give performance tests much attention. However, at CS 101 I learned that using the +operator in Java to build Strings is evil. It is not only evil, it’s also a sign of noobism. At my current job, we use the + operator all over in the code. When I first saw it, I asked my colleagues if doing that doesn’t hurt the performance and memory consumption. They replied that some tests showed that there is no real difference to using StringBuilder for example, except that using StringBuilder is more work. I had read some articles about String performance, and I knew that the compiler does some optimizations, but I wasn’t fully convinced. So I did my own ‘professional’ tests, and the result was: it doesn’t matter. Hence, I settled the issue and forgot it. Yesterday, a friend of mine was complaining about Java and its String handling. Since I am Java enthusiast, I thought not Java is the problem, probably its your code. Then I saw it again, the + operator!

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