Austin Java User's Group: Profilers and Sun SPOT

I went the the Austin Java User’s Group meeting last night. I’m not a regular attendee, but I’ve spoken there a few times.

Last night, in addition to some free pizza and drinks (thanks to Sun I believe, where the meeting was hosted) there were two talks:

• An overview and demo of several Java profilers by NetBeans evangelist Greg Sporar.
• An introduction and demo of Sun SPOT embedded devices by Sun evangelist Angela Caicedo.

I’d actually gone to see the profilers, but the SPOT talk was interesting as well.

Profilers

Greg went over YourKit, Eclipse TPTP, and the NetBeans profiler. YourKit is payware, of course, while the other two are open source. TPTP had an interesting, on-the-fly sequence diagram while the NetBeans profiler had it’s usual sexiness and ease of use.

Sun SPOT

The Sun SPOT is a little embedded device to test out programming embedded devices. It’s loaded with motion, light, temperature, and movement sensors and can cluster with other SPOTs over radio. You connect it your computer via USB and then you can talk to the other SPOTs.

It all reminded me of JXTA, which seems to be one of the forgotten but cool Java technologies. Maybe it’s big in defense ;>

I’d definitely want to play around with some SPOTs if I had the $499 to just spend on them. I don’t know what I’d do, but it’d be a fun way get more familiar with Java ME. Perhaps I could record the dogs movements during the day and graph them in 3D.

Trivia

Norman Richards ran a Java trivia contest and my team — aptly named ad hoc — managed to come in 4th place. I managed to help plumb the depths for a few of the questions, though I couldn’t figure out what JSR 1 is. My prize: a Java hoodie that’d make Rocky proud.

Disclaimer: Sun is a client.

Tags: ajug, eclipse, netbeans, profilers, javame, sunw, sunw, tptp, yourkit