Big news. I'm going West.

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....

I'm going to work for Sun

I have given my two weeks notice at my current company. Starting March 7th I will officially be a member of the core Swing team at Sun. I would like to thank Jeff Dinkins and all of the great engineers on the Swing team for letting me join their group. Special thanks to Scott Violet and Chet Haase for putting me through the wringer, seeing me fail miserably, and then giving me a job anyway. :)

Working on Swing is going to be a big opportunity for me and a big challenge, but I'm excited to be working on something that I consider to be so important. I personally feel that Rich Client Applications (which I loosely define as high quality desktop apps that interact with the network) are going to be the growth area for software development. It's the next big thing and I want to make sure that Swing is front and center.

I will initially be doing a lot of bug fixing (yay) so no longer can be content to I just complain. Now I'll have to pony up and actually fix things. :) I have a lot of interesting ideas for new projects that I'll be sharing over the coming months. Many of them will hopefully take the form of new open source projects like JDIC and JDNC (and maybe even a JSR or two) so I hope you'll all join me in building some really cool technology.

Oh, and I can't promise anything yet, but I'm going to do my best to get us some non-rectangular windows. (can't let IBM have all the fun!)

Second: I'm co-writing Swing Hacks

For the last few months Chris Adamson and I have been working on a new book for O'Reilly called Swing Hacks. It will contain a hundred different cool things you can do with Swing, ranging from sortable JTables to drop-shadow menus. Some of these are snippets of code we have found useful in our own projects, while others are just plain fun. My personal favorite is the animated transitions for tabbed panes. We don't have a firm press date yet but we are expecting it to hit the shelves sometime this summer. We might even get to sign a few copies.

Finally: Flying Saucer R5 is coming

A new release of Flying Saucer, the all Java XHTML renderer, is coming. The current CVS builds are very good and we're going to focus on stomping out bugs and get a new solid version out before April. This is going to be the big release. Flying Saucer is finally stable and fast enough to use in real projects, and once it ships I've got some really cool apps on the drawing board coming next.

So that's it. I don't want you to think I've been abandoning you all. On the contrary I love desktop Java and have been working furiously to get to do this stuff full time.

So, in summary, cool stuff coming and send in your bugs

Cheers, Josh

Talk to me about it on Twitter

Posted February 23rd, 2005

Tagged: java.net