Josh On Design

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! :)

Open JFX updated

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: