Josh On Design

I have been extremely remiss in my blog posting. A quick glance at Java.net says that my last post was August 26th. Well, my only excuse is that I've been mad busy working on the JavaFX SDK. Launching a new platform is a big deal, with many tiny details to be taken care of. I'm heading up the samples and demos effort to make sure we have lots of great sample code for you to learn from. As you can imagine that's taken pretty much all of my time. It'll be over soon, though. The end of fall approaches. :) And once we release the SDK I'll have tons of things to post about (after a much desired vacation).

In part one of this series I showed you how to set up a loading image, including an animated spinner gif. In this part I'll show you how use a screenshot or poster frame to speed up page loading.

You may have heard that JavaSE 6 update 10 is supposed to improve the experience of applets. You may have even seen the demos of dragging and dropping applets out of the webbrowser, but there's a lot more to it than that. In this series of blogs I'll show you how to get the most out of deploying your applets, even if you aren't using Update 10.

The initial JavaFX Preview SDK release has gone pretty well. There were a few snafus and broken links, but overall it has gone pretty smoothly for a first preview release. As we plan our next steps I thought I'd ask you all a question. In fact, I'm going to abuse the great power of my blog (2^-3 power, to be exact) by begging. So this is a blog beg, or bleg: what samples do you want to see?

Whew! Our launch of the JavaFX Preview SDK yesterday went pretty well. Only a few broken links which have since been fixed. After waking up at 5:30 am to turn on the new sites I spent most of the day monitoring weblogs and answering questions. It was a pretty good turnout, with most developers reacting positively to the SDK. Here's a quick rundown of things you might have missed.

I'm happy to announce that we have released the first preview version of the JavaFX SDK. Head over to JavaFX.com to check it out. We've all been working very hard on it for the last few months, so it's quite a relief to have it out. You can see my first post on our new official JavaFX blog. In this post I'll show you the code to build this graphical goodie below. (sorry, no snails involved Coté)

I always hate it when I get so busy that I can't finish an open source project I started. On the other hand, I absolutely love it when someone likes an idea I came up with but feels they can do it better, and then does. Case in point: AB5k aka Glossitope aka a new widget system for Java. I started this about two years ago, showing it off at JavaOne 2007. Alas, it ran into technical difficulties right at the time I started working on JavaFX, sucking away all of my time. Thus, the project is dead and the domain turned to dust. Or has it .... ?

I spent this week at OSCON having a great time. While I love JavaOne it's really not that fun for me. I'm usually involved in several sessions, a few demos, and getting a release ready. I don't get to actually attend JavaOne. I usually can't attend sessions and actually learn something new. It's an exciting experience, but not fun or relaxing.

We are now in the final push to get the first Preview Release of the JavaFX SDK out the door for the end of the month. I'm excited by what we've put together but also exhausted. We've done an incredible amount of work during the last year. Now I know what it was like in the early days of Java. Since JavaOne 2007 we've built (from scratch), a compiler for a new language with many non-trivial features, a GUI runtime with a new graphics and animation stack, new netbeans plugins with code completion, utilities for graphic designers, a new kind of javadocs (rewritten from the ground up), plus docs, samples, and demos. And that's not even counting the many improvements that are going into JavaSE 6 update 10. Whew! It's been a long year.

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.