For the past few months I've been working on an open source UI toolkit called Amino. It has lots of cool features like a scenegraph, CSS control skinning, and dynamic translation editing. You just have write your app in Amino and you get the cool stuff for free. But what if you have an existing Swing application and don't want to rewrite it? Don't worry, Amino's got you covered.
We are making progress on the next release of Leonardo, an open source desktop Java drawing program. One of the key features scheduled for the next release is a webservice that lets users save and share reusable symbols they've created. For example, someone could create a set of GWT mockup widgets, then share this set with others.
Ruby Red, the first full release of Leonardo Sketch is ready for download. Leonardo is a desktop open source drawing program written entirely in Java. In this first version of Leonardo, features include:
AKA: a Teachable Moment in Performance Tests, Profilers, and Debugging statements.
When you go to the polls today shouldn't you make sure you have the support of a drawing program that will fight for your interests in Washington?
If you're reading this blog then there's a good chance you've heard Apple has deprecated their implementation of Java on the Mac. Contrary to the resulting outrage over the last few days, I don't find change to be a shocking surprise.
A decade from now 90% of people will use phones, slates, or netbooks as their primary computing device. This is a very exciting development in the software world and promises to reshape the way we make software (check out the great stuff our lead developer is doing in his day job at Palm), but Amino isn't for that world. Amino about that 10%: the content creators who need killer desktop apps, the programmers who want great tools, and the knowledge workers who need to manage incredible amounts of information at lightning speed. Amino is the toolkit to build these apps.
A decade from now 90% of people will use phones, slates, or netbooks as their primary computing device. This is a very exciting development in the software world and promises to reshape the way we make software (check out the great stuff our lead developer is doing in his day job at Palm), but Amino isn't for that world. Amino about that 10%: the content creators who need killer desktop apps, the programmers who want great tools, and the knowledge workers who need to manage incredible amounts of information at lightning speed. Amino is the toolkit to build these apps.
Today I am proud to announce a project I've been working on for the past few months called Leonardo. I've long believed there's a need for a good desktop drawing app that is completely cross platform, free, and open source. Leonardo is that app.
As part of some open source stuff I've been doing on the side I've had to generate and parse a lot of XML. I like working with the DOM because it's tree structure cleanly matches my needs, but the W3C API is *so* cumbersome. The DOM was designed to be implemented in any language, not just clean OO languages like Java, so any code using it will work but be ugly. After considering a few other XML libraries I decided to write a new one that would work with modern Java 5 language features like generics, enhanced for-each, and varargs. This library is super tiny because it simply wraps the standard javax.xml libraries in the JRE, but gives you a much nicer interface to work with. Here's how to use it (or download it here):
There's been a ton of talk lately about several mobile operating systems and their problems, such as language restrictions, fragmentation, and anti-competitive practices. It's never a good idea to talk bad about your competition, so I'll take this opportunity to simply say a few things about the webOS (the OS that powers Palm's Pre and Pixi phones) that you might not know.
A big part of my new job at Palm is education, in the form of tutorials, blogs, and of course speaking at conferences. Two new speaking engagements have recently come up. Palm Developer Day and OSCON.
I'm excited to show you all one of the things I've been working on since I joined Palm.
Lots of people have opined on Apple's iPad, many deriding it's closed nature and lack of features. The thing is, those problems don't matter to most people. The iPad isn't for you or me. It's for everyone else. I've spent the last 20 years hoping we would have the technology to build such a device, even though I knew it was a device I would not personally use. But that doesn't matter..
You might be wondering where I've been the past few months. JavaFX and Java Store work has definitely heated up, which has taken up the bulk of my time. I've also been working on Project Maitai, a tool for reactive visual artwork, as well as traveling to Sweden to speak at OreDev.
As many of you may know, user interface design is a passion of mine. I want software that both looks pretty and acts well. I've had lots of ideas on the topic, often bleeding over into art and traditional design, in addition to usability. After thinking about it for a couple of years I've finally decided to create a blog dedicated to the topic: www.joshondesign.com
One of the big announcements at JavaOne was the Java Store. I'm especially proud of it because I've been secretly working on the project for the past few months. Since the announcement I've gotten a lot of questions on the store and how it relates to the rest of the Java ecosystem. To supplement the excellent FAQ I thought I'd answer a few questions.
Technically I'm on vacation this week so don't mention this post to my boss. I simply couldn't wait to blog about cool stuff we put into JavaFX 1.2. Shhhhh!
I've just arrived in SF for my fourth JavaOne conference. Despite the usual chaos this year's prep has gone very well. We have a ton of new things to show you. Most importantly we have the new release of JavaFX. As previously noted it has REDACTED, and REDACTED as well as greater REDACTED to make your apps run. Which, as you can imagine, is totally awesome. And of course the big news is support for REDACTED and REDACTED, as you can see in the screen shot below:
I don't normally post about job offers, but this one is simply too cool to pass up. The guys at Limewire are looking to hire a new Swing developer. For those of you who don't know, Limewire is the premier peer-to-peer file sharing client on the Interwebs. These guys have been doing killer Swing GUIs for a long time and even inspired some of the hacks the book Chris and I wrote. If hired, you'd get to work on their audio player and develop a new video player for the Limewire client. Sounds like a dream job.
A lot has happened since I last blogged. The JFXStudio hit 33k hits with 50 posts, I've started working on a new secret project built with JavaFX, and we had a rockin' booth at SXSW last week. I'll cover SXSW and our new party app in another blog soon. First things first: Developer Challenges!
Today I'm pleased to announce a new experimental site a few of us have been working on called the JFXStudio (www.jfxstudio.org). It's a site specifically for sharing your JavaFX creations. The JFXStudio is not meant to be an app-of-the-day kind of site, or a showcase for polished apps. It's a place where you can show off your doodles and works in progress. And it's a place where you can get great feedback on your JavaFX creations. Think of it as a Flickr or DeviantArt for JavaFX instead of images. Go check it out at www.jfxstudio.org. We've pre-seeded the site with creations from 6 prominent JavaFX bloggers (like the one below) and we can't wait to have more submissions.
I know I haven't been blogging, twittering, or doing the FaceBook very much lately. That's because I've been very, very busy working. As we promised last summer, the next release of JavaFX coming out soon. For desktop developers you won't notice too many changes, mostly bug fixes (and a feature or two). The big news is that this will be our first release with full mobile support. Of course this really isn't news either, since it's what we promised last summer. In fact, mobile support has been the driver for this release. Pay attention for news coming out soon with the details. So with no news for you, why am I writing this blog?...
I'm in the London airport awaiting my flight back home. After an exhausting week at Devoxx it will be good to be home and on vacation until the end of the year. And what a year it has been. At JavaOne we showed new JavaFX features and gave a roadmap for the JavaFX preview and final release. Now, six months later, we have hit every milestone and JavaFX 1.0 is out for the world to play with and build on. It feels immensely satisfying (and tiring) to have the bits out there.
First I'd like to thank The Hoosiers; a British band who, for reasons inscrutable to man, formed in the American midwest.
Why do I have a bad 80s song in my head.
Last week I gave two sessions on JavaFX at the OreDev conference in Malmo, Sweden (sorry guys, I don't know how to put the dots over the 'o' with my english keyboard). I had a wonderful time. This is one of the most organized and well designed conferences I've ever been to. The speakers were treated very well with shuttles to the conference, a tour of the city, and even a special dinner in the history city hall building with the deputy mayor.
I have been extremely remiss in my blog posting. A quick glance at Java.net says that my last post was August 26th. Well, my only excuse is that I've been mad busy working on the JavaFX SDK. Launching a new platform is a big deal, with many tiny details to be taken care of. I'm heading up the samples and demos effort to make sure we have lots of great sample code for you to learn from. As you can imagine that's taken pretty much all of my time. It'll be over soon, though. The end of fall approaches. :) And once we release the SDK I'll have tons of things to post about (after a much desired vacation).
In part one of this series I showed you how to set up a loading image, including an animated spinner gif. In this part I'll show you how use a screenshot or poster frame to speed up page loading.
You may have heard that JavaSE 6 update 10 is supposed to improve the experience of applets. You may have even seen the demos of dragging and dropping applets out of the webbrowser, but there's a lot more to it than that. In this series of blogs I'll show you how to get the most out of deploying your applets, even if you aren't using Update 10.
The initial JavaFX Preview SDK release has gone pretty well. There were a few snafus and broken links, but overall it has gone pretty smoothly for a first preview release. As we plan our next steps I thought I'd ask you all a question. In fact, I'm going to abuse the great power of my blog (2-3 power, to be exact) by begging. So this is a blog beg, or bleg: what samples do you want to see?
Whew! Our launch of the JavaFX Preview SDK yesterday went pretty well. Only a few broken links which have since been fixed. After waking up at 5:30 am to turn on the new sites I spent most of the day monitoring weblogs and answering questions. It was a pretty good turnout, with most developers reacting positively to the SDK. Here's a quick rundown of things you might have missed.
I'm happy to announce that we have released the first preview version of the JavaFX SDK. Head over to JavaFX.com to check it out. We've all been working very hard on it for the last few months, so it's quite a relief to have it out. You can see my first post on our new official JavaFX blog. In this post I'll show you the code to build this graphical goodie below. (sorry, no snails involved Coté)
I always hate it when I get so busy that I can't finish an open source project I started. On the other hand, I absolutely love it when someone likes an idea I came up with but feels they can do it better, and then does. Case in point: AB5k aka Glossitope aka a new widget system for Java. I started this about two years ago, showing it off at JavaOne 2007. Alas, it ran into technical difficulties right at the time I started working on JavaFX, sucking away all of my time. Thus, the project is dead and the domain turned to dust. Or has it .... ?
I spent this week at OSCON having a great time. While I love JavaOne it's really not that fun for me. I'm usually involved in several sessions, a few demos, and getting a release ready. I don't get to actually attend JavaOne. I usually can't attend sessions and actually learn something new. It's an exciting experience, but not fun or relaxing.
We are now in the final push to get the first Preview Release of the JavaFX SDK out the door for the end of the month. I'm excited by what we've put together but also exhausted. We've done an incredible amount of work during the last year. Now I know what it was like in the early days of Java. Since JavaOne 2007 we've built (from scratch), a compiler for a new language with many non-trivial features, a GUI runtime with a new graphics and animation stack, new netbeans plugins with code completion, utilities for graphic designers, a new kind of javadocs (rewritten from the ground up), plus docs, samples, and demos. And that's not even counting the many improvements that are going into JavaSE 6 update 10. Whew! It's been a long year.
One of the innovations in the JavaFX toolchain is our new javafxdoc tool. Rather than producing a set of html files like regular 'javadoc' does, we produce a single large XML file representing the entire codebase's API. This lets us easily add extra processing steps, such as producing semantic wellformed XHTML as you see today. It also lets us do a few other things. I think I've mentioned before the custom doclet tags for things like default value and read only attributes. Now we've added inline examples.
This is the next in my series of Java Doodles. There is a link to my previous one in the references below. This time I'm going to show you how to make a translucent window by setting the opacity value using new apis in JavaSE 6 update 10. However, I'm also going to show you how to make it fade in when you mouse over it, similar to some popular chat applications, as well as work properly on the Mac and degrade gracefully when running versions of Java.
While we wait for the full JavaFX SDK to be released later this summer I'd like to show you some cool desktop Java things that you can do right now. This is the first in a series I'm going to call Java Doodles, highlighting the new features in JavaSE 6 update 10, now in beta. Join me over the coming weeks when we will explore more cool things you can do with desktop Java.
So another JavaOne has come to an end. This time I think I finally tried to simply do too much. I'm lucky I didn't get the Moscone flu. Still, all in all, I think we had a good showing. I'm disappointed that the JavaFX SDK had to wait until July, but I'm glad we made the decision to put quality above meeting a conference deadline. Plus, there's a whole lot more to JavaFX than what's in the forthcoming SDK, which I'll discuss later this week. I've also been collecting links and cool demos to feature on our new website. You'll see some of them go up in the following months.
My first two video blogs with Rachel Hill are up. The first is a sneak peek of what's coming during my demo prep. The second is some excerpts from this mornings keynote, including the t-shirt hurling and Neil Young's Blu-Ray disk.
Well, the initial showing didn't go so well. The main parts worked but it crashed twice on stage when my boss demoed it. When we showed it again this afternoon and added Jabber support live, everything worked beautifully. I guess the demo gods were happy the second time around.
We launched JavaFX.com today. I'm very excited about this site since I was personally involved in putting it together. We have videos of the JavaFX demos from each keynote as well as explanations of what JavaFX is, where you can get more info, and a signup page to get the SDK when it's ready.
I almost forgot in the rush up to JavaOne that I recently appeared (is that possible in an audio only podcast?) in lucky episode 13 of the RIA weekly. RIA Weekly is a podcast by Michael Cote of RedMonk and Ryan Stewart of Adobe. I talked about JavaOne, our general goals for JavaFX, how the pieces of JavaFX came together, and what it's like working on designer tools.
You may be wondering why I haven't blogged recently, or why some of the JavaFX lists have died down, or more generally just what the heck we are all doing these days. Well, there's something you need to understand:
As we all rush headlong into JavaOne prep someone (okay it was James Gosling) sent me an email about performance of JavaFX. Speed is a crucial issue for anything dealing with user interfaces, so we care deeply about performance in our work with JavaFX. On the other hand we are focusing on bug fixes and correctness right now, not optimization, so it's not as fast as it could be.
Okay, so I've actually been back for several weeks, but JavaOne stuff has kept me super busy.
Today I think I shall use the power of my blog for evil instead of good. Well, maybe not evil but at least for my own personal gain.
This is some old videos from the early days of the internet. And by videos I mean VHS. Videos from the mid 1990s that taught you about what the internet is and how to use it. Check out the screenshots of Yahoo circa 1995 and the mention of Gopher.
Before I dive into my second doodle I'd like to mention the following Groodle. Allow me to explain. Andres Almiray saw my first JavaFX Doodle and decided to recreate it using the GraphicsBuilder syntax of Groovy; hence a Groodle! :) His first version is verbose, but later he updated it using the new alias syntax to be more compact. JavaFX is still a more concise syntax (IMHO), but Groovy is getting close and certainly has it's own strengths. I hope in the future Groovy will be another great way to build graphically rich apps on the Java platform. After all, why have one awesome way to build apps when you can have two! Be sure to watch Andres' excellent blog for updates.
Travel, travel, and more travel.
About four years ago when I started my blog I created a series of posts called Swing Hacks. This series eventually formed the basis of my similarly named book with Chris Adamson and led to my job at Sun. I think the series was successful. I still get an amazing number of hits to Swing Hacks 4, the Universal Right Click.
Things are going well on the designer tool, but we won't have anything to show publicly for a while. I will tease you with the news that I just implemented the first version of a drawing tool assistant that you have never, ever seen before. It's one of those clever things that seem obvious in retrospect, but no one (to my knowledge) has done it yet. But enough teasing: on to the question of the day.
Another Christmas will be here soon and it promises to be a good one
I'd like to take a second out of my usual technical blogging to discuss something important. Sun recently launched two new open source projects: the Scene Graph and PDF Renderer projects. In both cases some readers wondered why Sun felt the need to start new projects rather than contribute to or recommend existing open source and commercial projects. Is Sun opposed to commercial Java software vendors? Do we insist on reinventing everything ourselves? The answer is an unequivocal no. Each new project inside Sun goes through a rigorous vetting process to determine what projects to start and how. Today I'd like to let you see inside our brains and find out why we launched these new projects.
Last week I told you we had a secret new open source project to release. Think of it as an early Christmas present. A project that you've never heard of and has nothing to do with JavaFX (which is partially untrue, but I'll get to that in a second). Well, it's almost the end of the week so here is the secret. You can listen to MP3 announcement (played on stage at the JavaPosse's JavaPolis session), or simply read on. We are releasing an
Today Sun announced the open sourcing (GPL) of the new Java scene graph that underlies JavaFX script. And I'm very, very excited about it.
Since I joined the JavaFX team a few months ago I have spent some of my free time creating demos and learning the language. Most of my demos have been simple single class applications that highlight a particular language feature or graphical effect. After a while, though, I decided to write something bigger to prove it could be done and really stress test the language. As a result of feedback from me (and many other dedicated early adopters) we have some great improvements coming down the pipe.
As we head into the holiday season I'm feel pretty upbeat about the state of client Java. There are many challenges ahead, but things are better for client developers than they have been in close to a decade. Before I dive into the future let me do a quick recap.
The Java 6 developer preview (b88) for Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) does not run on 10.5 (Leopard). Having it still installed can cause a few problems with Leopard. In fact, using it on Tiger can cause issues because it's so different from Java 6 final that ships for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Because of this I recommend you delete it and wait for the final Java 6 for Mac. (Apple no longer makes this older version available on their download site either).
As I write this I am speeding over the Atlantic at around 500 miles per hour towards a two week business trip. The goal is to work out further details of the JavaFX tools and plan our schedule for next year. (And no I'm not going to give you any details. That's not what this post is about :). As I'm finishing up emails and pondering my two weeks of meetings I'm struck by a question: How did we get here?
Yep. I'm heading to Prague again, this time for two weeks. Since I'll have a bit more free time than my usual whirlwind trips so I'm making an offer.
With NetBeans 6 beta 2 out (and the final version going into High Resistance-"thou shall not break things" mode) I thought it might take the opportunity to show you some of the cool things you can do with it. I am a client guy, of course, so I'm very excited by the new features we've built to let you create and deploy desktop applications easily and quickly. I also wanted to try experimenting with screencasts. Since development of client apps is so visual I think a visual way of explaining them is good. This is my first screencast so please provide feedback of what you like and don't like.
I just wanted to let you all know that NetBeans 6 Beta 2 is out. Over the next few weeks I'll have more posts about the cool new stuff in NB 6, but for now I just want you to know it's ready for download. A whole lot of work has gone into making sure it's quality work and I think it shows. In fact, Beta 2 is now my only IDE. I've deleted every other copy of NetBeans and Eclipse from my HD. I've gone in whole hog; and freed up a lot of disk space. :)
I'm in Chicago trying to restore my iPhone and here is the result.
I'm once again heading out to the MidWest Java Tech Days to talk about JavaFX. This time it will be Minneapolis (Tuesday the 16th) and Chicago (Thursday the 18th). I'll actually be in Chicago most of the day on Wednesday with nothing to do. Is there anything I absolutely must do or see when I'm in Chicago? Is there anyone with free time that day (or evening) who would like to hang out with a super Java geek like me? If so then let's plan to get together joshua.marinacci@sun.com.
I purchased an iPhone yesterday and tried to activate it. Foolish, I know, but I'm crazy like that. Activating my iPhone today (starting last night, really) proved to be a multi-hour ordeal involving Googling, and spending over an hour on hold with AT&T representatives. The root cause was my Atlanta area code phone number not matching the zipcode of the town where I live in Oregon. The registration software didn't make this clear, instead giving me obscure errors and eventually sending me an email requesting I call a 1800 number. Adding to the confusion, Apple's own email program put the message into my junk folder. Had I not thought to search my junk folder a few hours later I might still be holding an iBrick. Now, after two hours with customer service and almost 24 hours after receiving my phone, I am finally syncing some music.
I've got a free moment here at the MidWest Tech Days (and if you are in the MidWest you should be here too!) so I thought I would tally the votes generated by my previous blog:
I'm going to abuse my celebrity and world renowned fame today (world renowned means the 5 mile radius around my house, right?). I have a technical question to ask my wonderful audience of readers (who are all beautiful, smart, and above average). I've looked through the Javadocs and some tutorials without understanding a few details, so here goes.
I'm thinking of working on another article or two over the next few weeks, but I don't know what to write about. Oh sure, I have lots of ideas, but I don't know what's most interesting to you. Ultimately my writing competes with about 4.8 billion other things for your valuable attention, so I only want to write the things that you want to read. Rather than speculate endlessly about this I've decided to take it directly to the people and have you to vote for your favorite idea.
Every year lots of developers come to San Francisco for JavaOne. More than fifteen thousand I think. But even more don't come to JavaOne; which might be a good thing since there are over four million of us Java developers out there. That would be a big cafeteria! Think of the line for lunch! Fortunately there is an alternative.
I recently gave a presentation at the Portland Java Users Group about Java FX. After talking to some of the fine members of PJUG I realize that there is a lot of confusion about JavaFX and JavaFX script. JavaFX Script is just one part of the larger JavaFX umbrella. In fact, you don't even have to use JavaFX Script to gain many of the benefits of JavaFX! This weblog posting is my attempt to clear up a few things and get you excited about the future of client Java. After reading it I hope you will come away with a better understanding of what JavaFX is and why we created it.
My friends back at the Swing ranch have been working very hard on the new Nimbus look and feel for Swing. When I first saw it my only complaint was that I couldn't get my grubby little hands on it right away. Well, it sounds like we shouldn't have to wait too much longer. Jasper's weblog has all of the details.
I'm exhausted so I'll just make this a brief lead-in to more blogs coming next week. The short news is that I've switched teams (again :). I'm now on the JavaFX team working on new tools. In fact, I've been in Prague all week meeting my new coworkers, as we hail from around the globe.
I have been in the open source world for a long time. Pretty much since I first installed Slackware in my sophomore year of college (I'll leave calculating that year and my age as an exercise to the reader). I have always felt that open source and commercial interests, when managed properly, can have a wonderful balance that benefits both the consumer, developers, and companies. That's one of the reasons I came to work for Sun, in fact. At Sun I get paid to work on open source software, which was pretty much my dream since college.
I know this isn't really Java related, but I just got an email that Sun's UltraSparc T2 launched today. Even though I'm not a hardware guy and I've forgotten most of my CompE classes from college, I'm still interested in the changing state of the art chip design.
It's not often that I see offers to pay someone to do a contract job on an open source project, with all of the code contributed back to the project. I know lots of people who work on particular projects full time as part of their job (myself, for example), but rarely do I see a direct offer of payment to have someone implement a particular feature. Perhaps the fact that I've never seen it on my projects means that my projects are perfect! :)
OpenJFX, the open source version of Java FX, was just updated. It has lots of improvements and demos, but the biggest thing is the first compiler, which will compile Java FX Script directly into bytecode rather than interpreting it. This is huge, because it makes FX Script a first class Java language, as well as being several orders of magnitude faster than interpretation.
The Flying Saucer team is proud to announce that we have just released version R7 Final.
The debate of hand coding your GUI screens versus using a tool has come up again. I suspect that Stuart wasn't expecting quite the volume response that he got. For some of you this is old hat and I suspect we aren't going to come to any conclusions here. I would like to say one thing, however. We need to split issue into two separate items that are actually independent, though related.
What follows is a particular problem I had compiling NetBeans on my Mac and my solution to it. I'm putting this in my blog not so much for my readers but for the future generations of Google travelers who may stumble across this same issue.
Due to a deluge of requests (both of them) here are the slides for our Awesome BoF 5000.
It's Friday morning and I'm watching the James Gosling keynote from the bean bags in front of the big screen. I'd say this was the most exciting JavaOne I've ever been too. We really saw desktop Java in full force. Perhaps we shouldn't call it desktop anymore, since a form of Java SE is going to be available on phones and other non-desktop computers. So really this was the JavaOne for client Java. Since I've spent most of my professional career pushing the limits of desktop Java I'm very excited about the possibilities of doing cool things on phones and TVs.
The AB5k team is proud to announce that we are changing names to Glossitope. We have a new website up at www.glossitope.org where you can download new builds, see our promotional video, and play with the new graphical effects we built for JavaOne.
The AB5k team is proud to announce that we are changing names to Glossitope. We have a new website up at www.glossitope.org where you can download new builds, see our promotional video, and play with the new graphical effects we built for JavaOne.
Another quick update. Hans and I did our session on JSR 296 today and it was a huge success. We were completely packed, over 500 people I think!
Hey guys. Real quick. I just thought you'd like that we (the NetBeans GUI Builder team) showed Open Street Maps on stage at CommunityOne in front of about >400 people. We did a demo where we built a database application live on stage that combines famous sites in London with photos from WikiPedia and the JXMapKit running Open Street Maps. And we did the whole thing with only a single line of actual code. Everything else was visually assembled in less that 5 minutes. I told the audience that we were using OSM which is "literally created by guys on bikes with GPS trackers. It's amazing". Everyone was very impressed. We'll have screencasts up once we finish JavaOne.
I was working on one of our NetBeans demos for Monday's Matisse session and it occurred to me. I was actually having fun putting together a little program! I grabbed some of our cool little beans from SwingLabs then wired them up to some text fields using zero code. Just binding expressions created visually using NetBeans M9. It was really easy and kinda fun. Beans binding makes the beans we've assembled in SwingX-WS in particular a whole lot more useful.
I've been too busy to blog for the past couple of weeks. Sadly this will continue for two more weeks until JavaOne begins. Don't worry, though. It's all in a good cause as you will see some great things shortly. In the meantime I leave you with a quick comic that actually made me laugh out loud.
I've been too busy to blog for the past couple of weeks. Sadly this will continue for two more weeks until JavaOne begins. Don't worry, though. It's all in a good cause as you will see some great things shortly. In the meantime I leave you with a quick comic that actually made me laugh out loud.
It was completely exhausting but it went quite well. Just to catch you up, last week I drove nine hours down to Santa Clara, CA to spend three days working on my demo then show it to the demo people. Here's how it works:
I'm heading back to the bay area this morning for a couple of days to take part in our annual Java One demo preview. This is when we each pitch our own Java One demos in a heated Java battle royale (tm) for one of the coveted few spots in the keynotes. I think you'll be happy with what I've put together. Wish me luck!
Yahoo Widgets 4 was just released today and I must say it looks pretty cool. They added a dock mode with mini-widgets and auto-widget updating. Part of me is frustrated because this is one of the things we have that they didn't until today.
Well it's been two weeks since AB5k was released and the response has been, well, interesting. Some people really love it. Others have complained it's slow and buggy (which it is), and still others ask "why make another widget system, but this time in Java?". We got somewhat panned at JavaLobby in particular. So, two questions to answer: too early and why Java?
Now that I've had a week to recuperate, and heal from my poor attempts at snowboarding, I can tell you about where I was the week before last. From the 5th of March to the 9th I was in Crested Butte Colorado for the Java Posse Roundup.
At the Java Posse Roundup last week we had some wonderful evening sessions called Lighting Talks. During these sessions each participant had 5 minutes to give their entire presentation. This necessitates, of course, brevity and clarity above all. And of course, since this was the evening, we were all sitting around munching on BBQ, drinking beer, and laughing away during the proceedings. So in short, it was a lot of fun. Some of the talks were Java related at all. Ido Green from Yahoo introduced us to the sport of orienteering and Joe Nuxoll from the Java Posse gave several presentations about the physics of race car driving. Fascinating stuff.
I got back from the Java Posse Roundup yesterday. Due to complications with my flights I was forced to spend an annoying Saturday night in a hotel in Denver. Still, the conference overall was worth it. I've got a bunch of things to share with you over the next few days so I'm just going to give you a few quick updates today.
I'm attending the Java Posse Roundup right now and won't have a chance to post in detail about this until next week, but since the news is out I wanted to make sure I let you all know what's up.
Just a quick post as I'm rushing to be ready for the Java Posse Roundup conference next week.
Milestone 7 of NetBeans 6.0 recently came out and I tried it out for the first time today. Now I know what you are thinking: "Don't you work on NetBeans? Don't you work for NetBeans?!" Well yes, I do. But I'm working on a branch that hasn't migrated to the 6.0 codebase yet. It will in the future (and I'll have blogs on it) but for now what I see every day looks pretty much like NetBeans 5.5. Trying M7 is my first taste of NetBeans of the future (other than my own highly excellent work, of course. but more on that later :) .
In previous blogs I introduced the JXMapViewer and JXMapKit, all part of the SwingX-WS project. We're still working on improving these classes and have more good stuff coming. I recently added support for non-rectangular maps, which makes the 1:2 Blue Marble map tile properly. I also added variable size tiles which allows the JXMapKit zoom out further. These are all nice improvements, but don't really matter if mapping isn't important.
Hans just announced the first prototype implementation of JSR 296, the Swing Application Framework. I'm very excited about this because it will make Swing applications a lot easier to build and more maintainable. I'm even more excited because we will have top notch support for JSR 296 in NetBeans 6.0. I know this because I'm one of the developers working on it.
My sincere apologies. I completely forgot to post the code from the last free project, sketch pad, so here it is. I also forgot that I have one more project to give away, one very different than anything else I've ever done. This one involves some hardware.
Some of you may have seen the five things you don't know about me meme going around. The idea is that someone tags you, you post to your blog five interesting things that people don't know about you, and then you tag five more people who must do the same. Romain Guy got it a few days ago and linked to me, so now it's my turn.
Well, the new year has come and my vacation is over. I the last three weeks I gave a way a bunch of projects, released the JXMapViewerApplet, I had my entire family fly to Oregon from all over the country, and got married to the beautiful Jennifer Greenup. I even got to stop for some coffee (see photo below). Not bad for a supposed vacation.
You may get several Christmas presents this year so I'd like to give you all mine first. Best to be early than late and forgotten. :) You can scroll down to the screenshot and link if you want, but if you prefer some delightful Christmas suspense begin reading here. You might want to grab some egg nog first. In fact, adding a splash of rum might help too. We've got a lot to go through.
I've been so busy with NetBeans 6.0 work that I haven't commented at all on NetBeans 5.5. We just went final about a month ago and had a big party in Prague. 5.5 is a big release, though most of the work is under the hood or on the server side and being a client side developer it doesn't affect me much.. The new Visual Web Pack is pretty nice though. There is one feature, however, that I am really excited about and that I use every day. Subversion support. With NetBeans 5.5 you can download Subversion support through the Module Update center, and it will be built in to NetBeans 6.0. So let's dive in. What is Subversion anyway?
So far the response to my free projects has been positive. There was a question about why I put the strange requirement of having to create a project to get the code. The simple reason is because I thought it was funny. I have no way to enforce that anyone does anything with the code. As with all of my open source work, I simply hope that something useful comes out of the effort I put in. So if you like the code just drop me an email saying so. That's really all. And with that, here is the code to the stacked editor.
The Stacked Image Editor is a little program I wrote and posted on my blog a year and a half ago. It is used to draw a certain kind of diagram very easily. In this case, I had a need to show something composed of layers, with each layer broken out visually so you could see how they stacked. I was learning more about how the hardware accelerated affine transforms worked at the time so it seemed like a good example app. You just add images as layers. The app will draw them sheared on an angle with transparency so you can see each layer distinctly. Once you've tweaked all of the settings you can save the whole thing out to an image.
The Screen Capture Uploader, released under the ominous name of Big Brother, is a simple program that runs on your desktop taking screenshots every few seconds, then uploading them to a server. The server then allows you to embed the screenshot, or a thumbnail, in your homepage.
Yes, I'm flying back from Prague today and we have wifi here on the Lufthansa aircraft. It's both expensive and power draining but amazingly it actually works. I don't know if should call it the coolest thing ever or scream because they have now taken away the only completely network free time left to us. sigh The march of technology, I guess. At least until the battery runs out.
I have often said that I don't love Java because I'm at Sun. I'm at Sun because I love Java. I love Java so much that I wanted to work at a place where I can do the most good for the Java community, and Sun is definitely that place. Now that Java is open source I think it means only good things.
After a several hour trek through Prague Castle and the Cathedral I arrived back at my hotel with around 400 photographs. It's going to take a while to go through them but here are some highlights.
Greetings from Prague. I've been at Netbeans for about two weeks now and it's been quite a busy time. I think I'm really going to like it here. Everyone is very friendly, the city is beautiful, and they have excellent and cheap beer (cheaper than soda!). I know you are all busy, so for the speed readers in the group I've bolded the important bits.
The following is a techtip I wrote which wasn't used. Since I turned out pretty well I thought I'd post it here. Let me know what you think. Would you like more of these small self-contained tips?
If there is any other Java people living in the Prague area who would like to go out for dinner, drinks, or do some general site seeing then just let me know. I'm going to be here for three more weeks and I don't know anyone yet. I'm reading through my Rough Guide book and it looks like there's lots of cool things to see here.
It's true. I'm leaving the Swing team. But don't worry, I'm not leaving Sun. I'm joining the Netbeans team, flying to Prague, moving to Oregon; oh, and I'm getting married!
Thanks to the hard work of several teams inside Sun (the development, testing, integration, and approval teams) combined with the persistence of the outside Java community, I am happy to say that the bug 6477341 will be fixed. More importantly it will be fixed in Java 6 final, not in an update release. The fix was just integrated into b103, which should be going up soon.
Not Awesome
I just read this. The last patent on the GIF format will expire on Sunday (October 1st, 2006). At long last the GIF format will be free. Of course we should all be using PNGs for everything, but thanks to lackluster IE support that's not always possible.
Welcome back. Last week I introduced a cool new technology we've been working on in SwingLabs, Painters, and described how they work. If you missed the first blog you should go read it now. Don't worry. We'll wait.
I don't usually blog on non-Java topics here, but I thought I'd make a mention of how Windows Vista is improving.
One of the temptations of design is to not show your work until it's ready. Not until every edge is smoothed and every bolt is tightened should anyone be allowed to see it. While this might be okay for paintings or sculpture, in the world of software it often leads to bad APIs. An API is the user interface for other programmers. I'm a firm believer that user interfaces must be tested with real users, and as early as possible.
One of the great things about my job is that I get to go speak to customers and other groups of Java developers. Even more amazing than the fact that Sun pays me to do this is that people actually show up to listen to me. I'm sure you've all had those times where you feel like you are still the dumb kid who just graduated and somehow you have to make everyone around you think you actually know what you are talking about. While I know that I'm a Java expert and have interesting things to say, a little part of me is still scared. What if I say the wrong thing? What if someone asks me a question that I can't answer. What if I walk into a room full of SWT lovers?! The agony!
In response to my Meet the Engineer interview on Sun.com a reader asked for the source to my magnifying glass component (originally detailed in this blog). I haven't given it out because it was meant to be part of a larger framework for managing the glasspane and implementing other cool hacks. Alas I have simply not had the time. Java 6 and Java 5 updates combined with my SwingLabs and community work simply have taken up all of my available resources.
Yes the best is yet to come, and won't it be fine...
In this segment we'll dive right into some of the bugs directly. In this series I won't cover all of the bugs because some of them involve structural changes that didn't directly fix visible bugs. For example, the XPStyle class was significantly changed by adding enum support. Enums let us more closely model Microsoft's UXTheme API and it's list of part constants. Also, I'm only covering bugs that were fixed. There are quite a few bugs which were closed as not reproducible or no longer a bug because they were fixed by another fix or simply can't happen any more because of other code changes under the hood. With that in mind, let's take a look at a few.
Coming soon! Hard hitting, action packed, and full of effects you probably never asked for.
So you have probably wondered where I've been. It has been quite some time since my last post and I have been very lax in talking about what's going on. Well, the big news is that we are almost done with Java 6. Not really, of course, since there still emergency fixes that could go in, but we've hit our final build of main development. This means that my work is mostly complete for Java 6 and I can start working on the update releases and Java 7. However, scheduling and builds is not what I'm here to talk to you about.
Chances are no one reading my blog will be able to answer this question but hopefully in the future someone will run across this post in Google and respond with the answer.
Recently Simon Morris posted a blog called In defence of the desktop where he asks :"If SE is truly the edition of Java aimed at the desktop, and most real desktop applications (browsers, players, word processors, video editors) are not database heavy, why is Java DB being included in the SE JDK?". I'd like to challenge the idea that real desktop applications don't need databases. They may not be database heavy (in that storing data is not their primary function) but I do think that there are a lot of desktop apps which use databases, or could be improved by doing so.
A few days ago we released the code to Aerith, our JavaOne demo that combines photos, mapdata, and 3d effects. We worked very hard to get the code out to you and let you see how everything works. However, if you've downloaded the code you may have noticed that the code for the map parts is missing. Only the binaries are provided in the JXMapViewer.jar file. That's because the map component has a brighter future than just a JavaOne demo. It is now the first component in our new SwingLabs project: The Swing Web Services components, or SwingX-WS.
It look more work than expected (doesn't everything?) but at long last we have released the source code to Aerith, our killer 2d/3d/webservices mashup demo that we showed at the JavaOne 2006 keynote, and later in the SwingLabs booth and at the Apple BoF. The response to the demo was very positive so we made a commitment to release the code ASAP. Finally that day has arrived and it's today. Go download the code at the new Aerith homepage.
So you have probably wondered where I've been. Possibly even missed me. Or maybe you haven't and are glad I haven't wasted any of your precious packets during the last month. In either case: I'm back with lots of interesting things on the way. I've been on vacation, traveling, spending time with family, and then back on the job working on Aerith and getting Mustang ready for Vista. So let's dive in to the good stuff:
I just arrived home after a both grueling and exciting week of JavaOne. I'm taking the next two weeks off, though I will be blogging a bit and answering the occasional emails. Don't be surprised if I'm a bit slow to respond though as I'll be in Oregon most of the time sipping coffee and enjoying the beautiful outdoors.
I'm sitting in the audience watching Tuesday's keynote where Romain Guy and Richard Bair are on stage showing the new Swing demo we built called Aerith. It's a roadtrip slideshow builder that combines Google Maps, Flickr, and Yahoo Geocode to let you make your own slideshow of photos you took on your trip. Once you are doing setting up the slideshow you can share the trip with your friends as an applet.
I'm doing lots of pre-JavaOne work right now and I could easily bore you with details of our Java.net Community Leaders meeting on Saturday, but instead I'll tease you with our demo.
We are getting closer to JavaOne and companies are preparing to announce their latest and greatest products. We will also have lots of discussions of Java vs AJAX vs Flash vs other hot tech of the day. Before we go down these and other rabbit hole discussions I'd like to take a moment to sit back and look at the big picture: Why are we here?
I'm going to be a complete nerd for a second and expound upon how amazingly cool it is that something I wrote has been translated into Japanese. I mean, writing down words that someone else pays for is cool and all, but it's even cooler when someone else translates my words into another language. The book even looks cooler. It's a tad smaller and has a very nice book jacket. The paper has a very different feel from the english printing; manga-esque actually.
I'm sure I'm the last Mac Java developer here to figure this out so I'm posting it not so much for you but for future generations intrepid googlers to find.
I'm always amazed by how big the Java ecosystem is. It really is a global community. When Chris and I wrote Swing Hacks we did it out of love for Swing, not to sell a lot of copies or make a lot of money. I'm always amazed when someone will pay for something I've written. When we hit an Amazon score of under 1000 (for a couple of hours anyway) I was bowled over.
This is totally off topic for Java, but I need to rant about computers for a second.
So here it is, I finally fixed my first bug in Mustang. By this I do not mean that I have fixed only one bug during my year at Sun, but that I finally fixed the very first one I started on. The bug is JProgressBar (indeterm.) renders wrong on WindowsLookAndFeel, Windows2000 + XP, which basically means that indeterminate progress bars look horrible on XP.
One of the great things about having a project like SwingLabs is that it gives me a place to put classes I've built that others might find useful. Today I'm going to describe my recent addition to SwingLabs, the EnumComboBoxModel, a cute little class that lets you stuff enums directly into your comboboxes with no extra work.
Some time ago I wrote an article for Slashdot discussing Be, Apple, and the future of operating systems. The mention of Be should indicate just how far ago this was. The other day I decided to try to find the article both to find out if I was at all correct in my conclusions, and to see if my writing has improved at all. Well, I couldn't find the relevant article, as Slashdot's archives are not complete (and their search engine even less so) but as I was going backwards in time I ran across some articles that are quite interesting today. I suppose it's odd to think of something as recent as 6 years ago in an historical context, but in Internet years it must be centuries. So let's dive in:
I would just like to say that I'm more and more impressed with Matisse. It does it's absolute best to provide a realistic preview of running components at design time. Today I was building some component tests and was amazed to see that indeterminate progress bars are animated while in the designer! Have a look!
I'm working on a program that requires I convert degrees of longitude into miles. Since we are mapping radians on to the sphere (mostly) that is Earth, I needed to do some trigonometric calculations. Upon whipping out some paper and pencil and drawing the triangles I needed I realized had to remember which function to use. Is it Sine, Cosine, or Tangent? Hypotenuse over Adjacent? Adjacent over Opposite? All... blurring... together....
Often times when you are building an application you need to hook multiple components together in such a way that when one component changes others must do something. When you are building custom components there is often the temptation to build a custom set of listeners to go along with it. This seems like good component etiquette; after all this is how most of the javax.swing.* components are built. Still, that's a big pain to create new listener types that must be implemented, just for observing simple changes. Plus it tightly couples your classes which can make your code brittle when making changes later. There must be a better way. And there is!
By now you've probably all read
Just a quick note to let you know that I've got a new article up about SwiXml. SwiXml is an open source library for building Swing GUI layout using XML instead of code (ie: the evilness that is GridBagLayout). In the article you'll learn what you need to get started using it and how it works. Check it out and let me know what you think. Also let me know what other articles you'd like to see. I'm looking for new ideas. Thanks Josh
I know it's been quite a while since I've written anything. I've been busy with quite a few project and I'll have some cool stuff to share soon. In the meantime I thought I'd show you an interesting tidbit I discovered in Matisse and Netbeans.
As some of you may know I'm a big Mac person. I split my time equally between my iBook (now heading back to the shop, alas) and my WinXP desktop. Being a dyed in the wool plain jane text editor type of programmer I've used jEdit for the past five years and have only recently started using an IDE like Netbeans. I've found Netbeans to a great productivity booster but on my iBook it seems to generate garbage at a mad pace. This is okay, it's just garbage, not a memory leak; but it's a pain when the editor locks up for five seconds to do garbage collection. Fortunately there is a solution.
I don't normally post about non Java related tech stuff, but I thought I would mention this really cool new filesystem called ">ZFS. It's part of Open Solaris but will most likely be ported to other OSes soon enough. Even though it's made by my employer I hadn't ever heard of it until news started hitting the web a couple of days ago (Sun is a big company, after all).
There's been a lot of talk lately about Web 2.0, and which technologies are going to take us there. We can debate the exact definition of Web 2.0, but I'd say a rough approximation would be an application which blurs the distinction between desktop apps and web apps. Many feel that the future is ultra-thin browser based client platforms like XUL or Ajax but I think that Java has a place, and will continue to grow in the future.
More of Tuesday
I woke up this morning painfully early, 4:00, which, as anyone who knows me can say, is the time that people should be going to bed, not waking up. Until recently I didn't even know there was a 4:00 in the morning. Oh well, such is the cost of jetlag. Considering I'm 14 (or 10) hours different I think I'm adjusting pretty well.
Last week I gave a presentation on Project Peabody for the Los Angeles Java Users Group, and I think it was well received. What's that? You've never heard of Project Peabody? That's okay. No one at the LA-JUG had heard of it either. We've only recently started using the name. Project Peabody is our community development project for new releases of Java; principally Mustang, aka: Java SE 6
I'm spending today packing for my exciting trip to Japan this week. Yes, I managed to wrangle a trip to JavaOne Tokyo, where I will be speaking on Java 2D performance, Swing layout, and helping out with the Peabody booth.
Katrina is big. Too big. By Katrina I don't mean the storm, but the overall situation. I feel like I did almost four years ago, unable to help or even understand much but realizing that our disaster services simply aren't up to the task. Sitting in California with sunny weather I wait, watch, and wonder what I can do.
Time stands still for no man. Technology even less so. The world moves on and we have to adapt.
I just got an email from my co-author and looked up the Fry's ads for the San Jose Mercury news. If you live in the Bay Area (or San Jose, at least) then you can get a copy of Swing Hacks for 20$ minus a 15 dollar rebate, for a final cost of 5 bucks. Supposedly it's even cheaper in Atlanta. I don't know what stores this applies to so be sure to check out the ads for the local Fry's in your area. So if you've been wanting to get the book it's on sale. Also be on the look out for a new article feature more Swing Hacks material that didn't make it into the book.
Every now and then I get the idea to build a cool program that does something interesting. Sometimes I get an idea by seeing another program, or seeing an interesting API I've never noticed before. Sometimes both. A few weeks ago I was thinking about how close to 3D I could get while still using the Java2D APIs. There's no perspective transforms in Java2D but you can fake a lot of 3D with creative use of the standard affine transforms. Around the same time Romain complained about having to draw some 3d diagrams using Photoshop. It wasn't hard work, just tedious.
This has to be one of the coolest frame hacks I've run across. I also think this is a great use of a gestural interface techniques. The idea is that you can fold windows down to access what is behind them. They have a small java application (54k) that does everything.
The highlights for me were our session for Swing Hacks and meeting with customers at the JDIC and JDNC booths (more on that in my next blog). It's great to interact with developers (my "customers" essentially) and get some real feedback.
Okay. So I realize this is about two weeks late. I've been on vacation back home in Atlanta and then catching up on about 4 weeks worth of email, blogs, java.net forums, and even some features I promised to the Flying Saucer and JDIC Misc projects. I actually wrote most of this over a week ago but just now got the time to finish it up. Enjoy!
It's been a long, fun, and exhausting week. I'm going to get some sleep and vainly try to take a flight home tomorrow. Since I'll be there for hours, most likely, this will give me time to write proper entries about the second half of the week and how the conference went overall. In the mean time, our book Swing Hacks is finally shipping on Amazon and we've hit almost #3000. (as of this evening) That puts us in the in 1st of all Swing books, 5th of all Java books, and 79th of all programming books. Combined with the great turnout for all desktop related sessions I think this bodes very well for Desktop Java and rich client development. Look out Flash!
Watching the keynote. Nice to see a reference to Morgan and Edison. We often forget our technology roots.
I promise I won't shill too much, but Chris just told me that our book was the number 2 seller yesterday according to the list posted by the book store! To our readers we send a heartfelt thanks!
Sunday is over and I need to get some sleep, as JavaOne starts for real tomorrow, but I wanted to blog down my thoughts (can blog be a verb now?) before I head off to the land of Nod.
My JavaOne week has actually started two days early on Saturday. Why? Because I'm a co-community lead for Java.net's Mac community. What's that? You didn't know that there's a Java.net Mac community? Hmm. That's a problem. Well, that's why we have the Java.net community leaders weekend event two days before JavaOne. It's our time to get together face to face, discuss the issues we face, figure out how to solve them, and then make Java.net a better place for all of you.
This is a random thought, but where are the pictures. Most java.net projects, even the ones that have some visual user interface (as opposed to a library like Rome), don't have screenshots or diagrams. When I come to a new project I want to quickly know what it's about and if it's quality. A picture really helps with that. I know it sounds bad, but if there's a picture then it can first tell me if these people are serious and active, or if the project dead. A picture can also convey a lot of information more quickly than a paragraph of text will. When it comes to visual projects, say a date picker component, then this is doubly important. Show me a picture! It just takes a bit of time and it really helps grab my interest.
Well. Here I am getting ready for my first real JavaOne. Actually, I attended back in 1999 and had the rare fortune to see Douglas Adams speak, but this is the first time I will be speaking as an author and attending as a Sun employee. It's going to be exciting. And since most Java developers can't attend JavaOne (where would they all sit?) I expect these Java.net blogs to light up like a Christmas tree during the next week. There's going to be all sorts of cool stuff going on, but don't just pay attention to the highlights. Some of the best things will be in the BoFs, smaller sessions, and especially the simple person to person talks over a good beer. (This is what we called P2P in the old days before they invented music, computers, and light.)
Today I was moving a bunch of files around for a new project. I had to copy several directories worth of code and images from a mounted remote disk to my home directory. Here's what I typed:
Joshua talks about what he's been doing, what's coming up, and hands out some reading material.
It's been a while since I posted my original weblog on why some developers aren't shipping Swing apps, and it's gotten over a hundred responses! This makes me happy because it means there are a lot of you out there who really care about desktop Java and want to ship good apps. It's our goal to make Swing the best way to write a quality desktop application, so all of this feedback is great.
As everyone on this side of the galaxy must know by now, Tiger, version 10.4 of Mac OS X (will they ever hit Mac OS XI?), has finally arrived. If you're a Mac head like me you've been eagerly awaiting it at least since the previews last summer, if not from day 2 of 10.3's release.
I've been working from home in Atlanta since I started at Sun. I have two homes under renovation and a lot of things to take care of before I can move out west, so working from home for a few months seemed like the best solution. The problem is I only own a laptop, my new iBook. Coding and writing for 10 hours a day on a 1024x768 screen really is no fun. I've got a USB hub, mouse, and keyboard to make it feel more like a desktop, but nothing can replace having a good screen. Today I bought a flatpanel.
The book is done and I'm up to my ears in Windows bugs so I thought I'd take a break and work on some Mac stuff. There are a few features I've always wanted from Java and needed anyway for another side project (I've got about 3 dozen, of course). The result is a few teeny, tiny classes I've added to the new JDIC Misc project. This project is meant as a catchall for small APIs, things that require only one class or perhaps even one method. The implementation may be complicated as all get-out, but to use it you need only call a function or two.
Hey guys. A while back I started talking about something called a MiniApp and presented several examples (Weather, Christmas, Storm, and RSI Buster). I wrote another installment some time ago but never got around to finishing it because other projects (namely the book) took precedence. Now that Chris and I have turned in our final draft (yay!) I have more time to finish up the next MiniApp.
If you are like me you have broken finger bindings. Probably from years of bash use or maybe you just have to switch platforms all the time. Since finger bindings are difficult to change this little utility will change the key bindings instead.
Time and time again I hear that there are no Swing apps (or no good swing apps). We can come up with lots of excuses and explanations but that doesn't get us any closer to having more Swing apps. So I'd simply like to ask all of you. Starting with the assumption that all of you are Java developers in some fashion or another, but not necesarily Swing developers, I want to ask you:
I should start off by saying that I'm not a big fan of revision control systems. What I want out of an RCS is simple. Let me check files in and out so that my code is backed up and I can revert and merge as needed. I have found that branches rarely get used except in the biggest of projects. Though your RCS system can probably handle it, developers are still people and you can end up in a lot of trouble when you work on more than one branch at a time. Over the years I have used PVCS, RCS, Contiuum, Source Safe, Star Team (I think that was the name) and a few others. I keep coming back to CVS because it does exactly what I want (backup and store revisions of a tree of files) and does it with a few simple commands. It also has the advantage of being supported everywhere.
As many of you have discovered, your submissions to JavaOne were rejected. Don't feel bad. Only one of my 6 proposals were accepted, and I'm now a Sun employee myself. I the competition was fierce. The upside is we should have a really rocking JavaOne conference coming up.
Hello All. I know it's been a while since I've been posted, so I'd like to let you all know what I've been working on. Lots of good things have happened or are coming soon. First of all....
Normally I don't comment on new products, especially hotly anticipated ones that a million others will pontificate endlessly. However, I'm breaking my rule because I'm quite amazed by the new iPod Shuffle and iMac Mini. Not because of the products themselves but because of what they represent. They are both the triumph of software over hardware.
I know it's been a while since I've posted, and sadly it's going to be a while until I do again. Work, my opensource projects, and my book are keeping me slammed. I've lots of good stuff cooking, so stay tuned.
Send me your ideas of what you'd like to see out of webstart. What are the missing features. What are the most important bugs? I want to figure out what we can do through addons and what requires changes from Sun.
Usability is the number one concern when designing software. And I don't mean "today with modern computing and the lack of new types of software usability is easier and growing in importance". I mean computers have no other purpose than to serve humans, and a better computer serves humans better. End of story. Software that doesn't conform to the way humans do things is bad software. (bad!) I don't care how cool and awesome your software is, if it's not understandable then it's useless.
Back when the Web was just emerging (you know, from the primordial soup of standards) many developers put effort into making it easy for lay people to create websites. While most focused on WYSIWYG development tools or content management systems, some developers tried to sell Applets and JavaScript libraries. These were small programs that could be embedded easily into a website and customized without the use of code. No need to write your own tree control: just set a few properties on this library and you're good to go.
One of the things I love about Java is that I can quickly change things. With an army of libraries and Java's renowned platform independence I can quickly hack on a new feature or move code from the client to the server. A couple of days ago I showed off a webstart app with, umm, a few issues. I now proudly present :
I think this MiniApp idea is starting to have legs. Thinking about all that Java Web Start provides we can start to imagine an application category: the so called "Rich Client". The key to a successful rich client is that it must do something that neither webapps nor native programs can do well. It must exist outside of the webrowser (the rich part), use the network for something (the client part), and not require installation (or as minimal as possible). I think my new MiniApp does this quite well.
While playing around some more with this miniapp idea, I came across geographer Tyler Mitchell's weblog post about hurricane tracking using Web Map Service urls. I thought this would make an interesting MiniApp and give me a good opportunity to play with a few webservices. Starting from his base (and with some greatly appreciated clarification emails from Tyler), I've created StormDrain, a simple program that loads WMS data and displays it graphically. Here's what it looks like:
Hmm. Perhaps it should have been mouth.getLocation() instead. That would present a more consistent BadJoke API. :)
I've been thinking about the miniapps idea some more. I still think it's a good idea, but I want to extend it a bit. Miniapps are great and all, 'cause they're, well, mini.. but I want more. Java is supposed to by write once run anywhere, but in practice any given program only runs on one computer. I'm not talking about whether it can be on Mac or Windows. I mean that I typically install the software on one computer and that's it. If we've got this great portable runtime then why aren't our applications truely portable?
It's gonna be a busy week so I'll keep this short. I've been thinking a lot about moveable applications and the idea of rich clients. This is mainly on my mind because the Flying Saucer team has been hard at work on the next version of XHTMLRenderer. (We're shooting for an August 31st release) An embedded rendering component has pretty much one core use: applications with both GUI and html interfaces. But what do they look like? What creatures live in that shadowy borderland between the desktop and the web?
It's been a little over a year since I've been here, and what a year it's been. Or something along those lines.
I have to say that Java2D is amazing simply for it's productivity. The other day I was watching the psychedelic display in iTunes when I thought, I wonder how hard it would be to do that? I know it's a blurred and stretched out from the center, but that was pretty much it. I found some demoz that did something similar but I didn't feel like pawing through badly documented C++ code to figure it out. Instead I went to Java2D and wrote this in about half an hour:
The last few months have been great for client side Java. With the release of JDIC, JDNC, Java 1.5 betas, and more support than ever from Sun, I think we are seeing a revival in interest for client side Java. Still, I hear the usual refrain: "If Java is so good on the desktop, then where are all of the commercial apps?" If I point to something like LimeWire I get: "No. I mean big applications, like Word." Well, I never have an answer for that one. I didn't seven years ago and I don't know. Speed and API support isn't an issue anymore, but there still aren't any well known commercial applications written in Java. That finally led me to the question "Is any big name application written in anything other than C/C++?"
I normally try to be even handed, un-biased, and bi-partisan; but today I'm going to shamelessly use my muchly vaunted position as a highly skilled blogologist in field of java.net to plug my new project: Flying Saucer, an all Java XHTML + CSS renderer.
On the plane back from California I decided I've had enough with politics for a while and I'm ready to get back to coding. One thing I've always thought was missing from Swing is a good color chooser. Swing provides a color chooser model and a default color chooser, but it's always felt unfinished. Another 3rd party opportunity I suppose.
I'm going to try to really tackle the issue of opensourcing Java and state my opinion of why it's a bad idea. Then I'll propose a way would could do it without all of the problems. It's a long one but please read to the end and provide your feedback. This is an issue that many feel strongly about and has the potential to influence Java's long term future. And as a career Java developer, it's something that personally concerns me.
So it's been a week and I've seen a lot of response to my last entry. One commentor in particular asked for a point by point rebuttal; which struck me as a spectacularly good idea. Here are the bulk of the arguments and my responses.
I recently read on Slashdot (something I promised myself I was going to do less) about Miguel de Icaza's comments on Longhorn. It was a pretty interesting read and makes me think I should read up on XAML and Avalon, Microsoft's new technologies for making advanced rich web applications. What struck me as particularly jarring, however, was this thread where someone asked about Java as a webapplication stack to compete with Microsoft or an as yet unwritten opensource toolkit. Most of the readers jumped on this and attacked Java from all sides. What particularly worries me was not that so many of these readers are opposed to Java, but that their arguments are almost completely wrong. Take a look at some of these comments:
I don't want to talk about how Open Source technology changes the rules by breaking up monopolies or giving you the freedom to reconfigure. I want to talk about actual economic effects as the cost of software approaches zero. It doesn't just save money, it produces new features by the way it's used.
I know it's been a while since I've posted. But I've been busy. With, um, you know, stuff! Writing stuff. Coding stuff. Drawing stuff.
I haven't written anything in a while because it was a busy Christmas season, Kimi is going back to school along with work, Lizi has to be fixed, and I started an exciting new job in the field of document management. But more on all of these later. Back to technology.
A lot of people have put out lists of what they expect to see for the new year. Instead of going across the industry I'm going to focus on one topic in particular: networked applications. I really think that 2004 is the year of the netapp. Now sure, I know what you're thinking: "I thought 1994 was the birth of the most popular networked application ever: the webbrowser. You're about ten years too late". I'm not talking about the webbrowser. It's a general purpose application that isn't very good at anything, but good enough for almost everything. I really think the last few years have shown a desire for specific networked applications that, in the long run, will blow the pants off ye old browser.
I've always wanted to make some sort of display that draws outside of a window with images scattered all across the screen. Though previously impossible in Java, I found a way to do it. And since Christmas is coming up I thought I'd use it to make a snowflake display. Here's a cropped screenshot of what it looks like:
We hear a lot about development processes these days, but I'd like to know what techniques people actually use? Do you create UML diagrams? Do you map out the states? And when it comes down to the actual code, how do you break it up into classes and packages? Does your methodology vary depending on the type of program you are creating?
I was looking at the referers to my Swing has failed article and I noticed a site called Java Hispano.org. I think it's really cool that there is a spanish language java site. This is one of the things I love about the Java community. It brings together people from many different backgrounds, unified by the goal of making high quality reusable software.
I've been playing with Swing a lot lately for my new series of articles. In my research I came across another interesting class java.awt.Robot. It's a class that can automate the UI, mainly for testing. One particularly cool feature is the mouseMove function. Once I saw this I got evil ideas. :) Imagine rogue java programs that move the mouse cursor to mystify and befuddle the user. Spelling out hideous horrible messages. Redrum! Redrum!. :)
When reading discussions about Unix versus Windows versus Mac, I often hear people complain about the Point, Click, and Drool user interface. This is usually directed at the Mac, but I've heard it refer to Windows and even KDE before. These people imply (or sometimes simply state) that powerful computers are hard to use and that these easy to use computers are for mindnumbingly stupid people who can't be trusted with pencils, much less normal computers.
Yes, that's right microwaves are evil. More specifically, the microwave in my office. Or, to get right down to it, the interface on this microwave. You see, it's awful. Just plain awful. And yet, I've seen worse.
It's been a while since I've written something, so I thought I'd start out with another Swing Hack. This time I've expanded on the overlay idea of SwingHack 3 by adding sort of a magic lens. In this hack the overlaid information can only be seen when the special lens cursor is over it. To pull this off I've created a custom cursor using a buffer image and set it on the glasspane. The buffer contains a crude set of boxes to define the view area, but you could just as easily use an image of a magnifying lens. Next I've restricted the drawing of the glass pane to only be under the cursor by getting the cursor coordinates from a mouse motion listener and setting a clipping rectangle centered around the cursor. Finally I've added code to print the mouse coordinates as part of the cursor. Run, compile, and you get this: (pretend that you can see the cursor which Windows printscreen thoughtfully removes for you)
Chris recently wrote about the jApps One in particular intriqued me: the Dukester a little java box that plays MP3s and can download other things. This fits very nicely with an idea I had a few years ago and always wondered why no one ever did it: good MP3 car stereos.
I have often wondered how people learn to program today. In the old days we had Basic and Logo, but what do kids use today? The old standbys are powerful enough to make something for the web (assuming they even exist) and nothing else has a simple development environment for children. Perhaps we need something new.
I stumbled across an older online magazine recently. A List Apart has a wide variety of topics, ranging from CSS and typography to what a designer truly does for their client. While the discussions range from the technical to the philosophical they always target their stories at designers. They've built a truly useful site and I look forward to their return (it's on hiatus now but should be back soon with new content).
I received an email today asking about my use of the glass pane. It seems this fellow wants to handle right clicks on any component in each screen. A logical request. In most cases your right clicks are not limited to a single component, yet to receive the events required to show popups you have to add a listener to each component! Not enjoyable.
As part of a new project for work I have finally broken down and learned Struts and JSPs. Struts is tremendously useful. I wish it had been around five years ago when I was up to my ears in webbased applications. But JSPs I've never been impressed with. They are good for templating but the combination of java code and html always seemed crufty. I've been minimizing the amount of code I put in them and certainly prefer to use something like XSL to keep the UI and code separate.
It's Friday so I thought I'd do another Swing hack:
There's been an uproar about Phillip Greenspun calling Java the SUV of computer languages lately. I don't agree with the general theme of the entry that a project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a scripting language.
I've been thinking. We have lots of software crashing these days. Some due to bugs. Some due to viruses and worms. Some due to hardware failure. And yet software is becoming more common and important than ever before. So what can we do to make software more reliable? Can it be 100% reliable when it is written by failable humans.
A lot of people have been complaining about the loss of jobs in the programming field, and it's only going to get worse they say. I don't think it's true. There will always be work for the career programmer. We just have to make sure we move up the abstraction ladder. Even in a world where basic coding is done overseas and many components are opensourced, there's still plenty of work to be done, and paid for.
Last week I spent a much needed vacation in The Outer Banks. If you ever see a sticker with OBX in a circle on it, that's the Outer Banks. Beautiful and isolated barrier islands off of the coast of North Carolina, they provide great rest and relaxation. And also the opportunity to think about how technology fits in our lives. I've got lots of new ideas to discuss in my coming entries, but one in particular struck me: Passive technology.
While crusing through the AWT/Swing documentation for another project I ran across a method I never knew existed: Toolkit.setLockingKeyState(int keyCode, boolean on). It's been there since 1.3 (which is what, 3 years old now) but I never noticed it before. Hmm, I thought. What could I use that for?
While working on another project I came up with a silly idea. How could I force windows to remain completely on screen and to snap to the screen edges? A simple form of window snapping. Since you can receive an event every time the window is moved it's easy to create a Component Listener to do it.
I've seen lots of arguments on the merits of weak typing. It encourages flexiblity. It lets me write code faster. I don't worry about the details until later. I can do cool runtime tricks.
I have a webserver. It's a small box sharing a friend's static DSL line with a few other boxes. It does the job pretty well, hosting the websites for my family members. When the blogging revolution hit I wrote some journaling software for myself. It was written in Perl originally, later switching to a servlet with XSLTs. This was great for me but not so great for my sister when she wanted a weblog. She can write HTML and copy links. That's about it. No javascript and certainly no knowledge of XSL templating. My solution was to switch to JSPs. I told her as long as you don't edit these magic tags everything will be fine. All is good until she says she wants a counter.
In my years as a professional programmer I have used many Revision Control Systems (RCSes). It's that software that manages and protects the software you use. One of the tools of the toolmaker. Many companies pay tens of thousands of dollars for this software, often licensing it per-seat, and yet a perfectly good free alternative exists: CVS. In fact I will argue that there almost no reasons not to use CVS. While there are some other RCSes which beat CVS on technical grounds like parallel development I think that CVS has the edge in everything that counts.