I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Wonderland and JavaOne
Probably the best presentation I saw at JavaOne was left to last. James Gosling previewed Wonderland. At first I thought this was just yet another Second Life, avatar-based demonstration. However, when they started showing the avatars working within the virtual world with the same programs (Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) as you'd use in the real world, it took on a completely new importance. This was very cool. Being able to create rooms where you could display your code dynamically and updateable (on "glass" walls, no les ;-) as though you were in a physical equivalent, show presentations, have true meetings where (almost) everything you'd want to do if you were face-to-face could be done, is a significant step forwards. Nice.
Is this project looking glass? I remember a similar thing to this which I used to play with in smalltalk (you could fire up browsers etc). Plus you could bring up the smalltalk object browser at any time and tinker with stuff (scary cool).
ReplyDeleteWhen it works well, could really be useful. We just need multiple 40 inch screens and tactile interfaces and we will never need to leave the house !
Sorry the delay in replying Michael.
ReplyDeleteI missed the start of the presentation, but I thnk it's based on Looking Glass. I'm dropping all IM chat and moving there next week ;-)