Event Report: NYC Java Meetup

I attended the New York City Java Meetup last night. Here are some notes and thoughts from the meeting.

JavaFx (just released) was demoed and discussed. It's targeting Flex and Silverlight. One person had actually used it. Some of the gripes surrounded the lack of developer support, syntax changes, and inability to work embedded in an regular applet (this is supposedly coming soon). It is able to run on a myriad of devices - tv, phone, pda, and pc. The online demos show that you can get a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.

Scala was next up for presentation. It's a blend of object-oriented and functional programming languages. It only supports single inheritance. The demo was pretty tough to follow as it depended on reading 8 point font at 30 yards without context. The scala plugin for eclipse was said to be pretty flaky. The presentation generated several questions about the syntax and how specific things should be done with Scala as opposed to Java. Lift is the Scala equivalent of Rails. Examples will be posted on the meetup site.

jRuby, clojure and any other topic based around the java platform are welcome to be presented here.

Next topic was for xmlvm - it's a cross compilation tool that will let you (for example) convert from java bytecode to objective-C or javascript. This lets you write a java app and convert it to run on the iPhone. Also referenced was a Google talk on building a java app for your iPhone.

Good conversation was had over pizza following the official meetup. I'll be looking to present 10gen at either the January or February meetup.