Josh On Design

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.