Josh On Design

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.