Josh On Design

Just a quick post as I'm rushing to be ready for the Java Posse Roundup conference next week.

Milestone 7

Milestone 7 of NetBeans 6.0 recently came out and I tried it out for the first time today. Now I know what you are thinking: "Don't you work on NetBeans? Don't you work for NetBeans?!" Well yes, I do. But I'm working on a branch that hasn't migrated to the 6.0 codebase yet. It will in the future (and I'll have blogs on it) but for now what I see every day looks pretty much like NetBeans 5.5. Trying M7 is my first taste of NetBeans of the future (other than my own highly excellent work, of course. but more on that later :) .

In previous blogs I introduced the JXMapViewer and JXMapKit, all part of the SwingX-WS project. We're still working on improving these classes and have more good stuff coming. I recently added support for non-rectangular maps, which makes the 1:2 Blue Marble map tile properly. I also added variable size tiles which allows the JXMapKit zoom out further. These are all nice improvements, but don't really matter if mapping isn't important.

Hans just announced the first prototype implementation of JSR 296, the Swing Application Framework. I'm very excited about this because it will make Swing applications a lot easier to build and more maintainable. I'm even more excited because we will have top notch support for JSR 296 in NetBeans 6.0. I know this because I'm one of the developers working on it.

My sincere apologies. I completely forgot to post the code from the last free project, sketch pad, so here it is. I also forgot that I have one more project to give away, one very different than anything else I've ever done. This one involves some hardware.

Some of you may have seen the five things you don't know about me meme going around. The idea is that someone tags you, you post to your blog five interesting things that people don't know about you, and then you tag five more people who must do the same. Romain Guy got it a few days ago and linked to me, so now it's my turn.

Well, the new year has come and my vacation is over. I the last three weeks I gave a way a bunch of projects, released the JXMapViewerApplet, I had my entire family fly to Oregon from all over the country, and got married to the beautiful Jennifer Greenup. I even got to stop for some coffee (see photo below). Not bad for a supposed vacation.

You may get several Christmas presents this year so I'd like to give you all mine first. Best to be early than late and forgotten. :) You can scroll down to the screenshot and link if you want, but if you prefer some delightful Christmas suspense begin reading here. You might want to grab some egg nog first. In fact, adding a splash of rum might help too. We've got a lot to go through.

I've been so busy with NetBeans 6.0 work that I haven't commented at all on NetBeans 5.5. We just went final about a month ago and had a big party in Prague. 5.5 is a big release, though most of the work is under the hood or on the server side and being a client side developer it doesn't affect me much.. The new Visual Web Pack is pretty nice though. There is one feature, however, that I am really excited about and that I use every day. Subversion support. With NetBeans 5.5 you can download Subversion support through the Module Update center, and it will be built in to NetBeans 6.0. So let's dive in. What is Subversion anyway?

Last week's project

So far the response to my free projects has been positive. There was a question about why I put the strange requirement of having to create a project to get the code. The simple reason is because I thought it was funny. I have no way to enforce that anyone does anything with the code. As with all of my open source work, I simply hope that something useful comes out of the effort I put in. So if you like the code just drop me an email saying so. That's really all. And with that, here is the code to the stacked editor.

The Stacked Image Editor

The Stacked Image Editor is a little program I wrote and posted on my blog a year and a half ago. It is used to draw a certain kind of diagram very easily. In this case, I had a need to show something composed of layers, with each layer broken out visually so you could see how they stacked. I was learning more about how the hardware accelerated affine transforms worked at the time so it seemed like a good example app. You just add images as layers. The app will draw them sheared on an angle with transparency so you can see each layer distinctly. Once you've tweaked all of the settings you can save the whole thing out to an image.

Screen Capture Uploader

The Screen Capture Uploader, released under the ominous name of Big Brother, is a simple program that runs on your desktop taking screenshots every few seconds, then uploading them to a server. The server then allows you to embed the screenshot, or a thumbnail, in your homepage.

Posting from 30k feet over north eastern Canada

Yes, I'm flying back from Prague today and we have wifi here on the Lufthansa aircraft. It's both expensive and power draining but amazingly it actually works. I don't know if should call it the coolest thing ever or scream because they have now taken away the only completely network free time left to us. sigh The march of technology, I guess. At least until the battery runs out.

I have often said that I don't love Java because I'm at Sun. I'm at Sun because I love Java. I love Java so much that I wanted to work at a place where I can do the most good for the Java community, and Sun is definitely that place. Now that Java is open source I think it means only good things.

After a several hour trek through Prague Castle and the Cathedral I arrived back at my hotel with around 400 photographs. It's going to take a while to go through them but here are some highlights.

Greetings from Prague. I've been at Netbeans for about two weeks now and it's been quite a busy time. I think I'm really going to like it here. Everyone is very friendly, the city is beautiful, and they have excellent and cheap beer (cheaper than soda!). I know you are all busy, so for the speed readers in the group I've bolded the important bits.

The following is a techtip I wrote which wasn't used. Since I turned out pretty well I thought I'd post it here. Let me know what you think. Would you like more of these small self-contained tips?

If there is any other Java people living in the Prague area who would like to go out for dinner, drinks, or do some general site seeing then just let me know. I'm going to be here for three more weeks and I don't know anyone yet. I'm reading through my Rough Guide book and it looks like there's lots of cool things to see here.

It's true. I'm leaving the Swing team. But don't worry, I'm not leaving Sun. I'm joining the Netbeans team, flying to Prague, moving to Oregon; oh, and I'm getting married!

Thanks to the hard work of several teams inside Sun (the development, testing, integration, and approval teams) combined with the persistence of the outside Java community, I am happy to say that the bug 6477341 will be fixed. More importantly it will be fixed in Java 6 final, not in an update release. The fix was just integrated into b103, which should be going up soon.