Josh On Design

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:

Every year we all rush around trying to make the coolest demo ever, hoping to get into the coveted few demo slots for JavaOne keynotes. We show the demo to the team of people who decides these things, including James Gosling, then the best of the bunch are chosen to make it into one of the keynotes.

Two years ago we (the SwingLabs team) built Joplin, an MP3 player app with effects and realtime music visualization. Last year we made Aerith, the 3D Flickr/ Google Maps mashup. Not only was it a super cool demonstration of Java but most of the technology has since migrated into other SwingLabs technologies like the JXMapViewer, SwingX Painters, and Timing Framework.

This year I'm submitting AB5k as my demo. The competition is fierce and having seen what Jasper and Rich cooked up for SwingLabs and what Ken is working on for JOGL I can say that no matter which demos get in you'll be very impressed.

After showing AB5k to anyone who would listen, getting some great feedback from some Swing and Java2D guys, and implementing a slew of new features and eyecandy; I gave the demo Wednesday afternoon. I think it went pretty well. I got a lot of questions, even though my slot was at 4PM and the review team was probably quite tired (one demo every 15 min since 9AM == a lot of demos). Also, James gave me a thumbs up so that's always a good sign.

I won't know for a while if we are in the keynote but in any case it was a lot of fun and greatly improved AB5k itself. Even if we don't get into a keynote you'll all get to see what I've been working on at the AB5k Birds of a Feather session and in videos that I will post online.

Okay, back to work on bugs and getting NetBeans ready for M9. Thanks everyone.

update

We announced AB5k in a Java Posse Roundup session a month ago in Colorado. The audio from that session is now available for download here.