Josh On Design

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.

Today I think I shall use the power of my blog for evil instead of good. Well, maybe not evil but at least for my own personal gain.

This is some old videos from the early days of the internet. And by videos I mean VHS. Videos from the mid 1990s that taught you about what the internet is and how to use it. Check out the screenshots of Yahoo circa 1995 and the mention of Gopher.

Before I dive into my second doodle I'd like to mention the following Groodle. Allow me to explain. Andres Almiray saw my first JavaFX Doodle and decided to recreate it using the GraphicsBuilder syntax of Groovy; hence a Groodle! :) His first version is verbose, but later he updated it using the new alias syntax to be more compact. JavaFX is still a more concise syntax (IMHO), but Groovy is getting close and certainly has it's own strengths. I hope in the future Groovy will be another great way to build graphically rich apps on the Java platform. After all, why have one awesome way to build apps when you can have two! Be sure to watch Andres' excellent blog for updates.

Travel, travel, and more travel.

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.