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    • JavaOne 2011 Thursday and wrap-up

    October 7th, 2011
    Opinions expressed in the post are solely my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

    Thursday started with the Community Keynote. Well, it actually started with a 25 minutes IBM presentation about their cloud story. This had obviously nothing to do with the topic of the event and later speakers pointed this out rather frankly. At least it was interesting to hear that there is a job title like “Cloud Architect”.
    The real part of the Community Keynote started with a quiet moment to honor Steve Jobs.
    Later on, various winners of the Duke choice award and JUG luminaries cared for a lighter mood again, presented their work and asked the audience for participation in their local JUGs and in the advancement of Java via the OpendJDK. The JavaPosse appeared on stage and presented a funny show.
    It was also announced that many of the JavaOne talks will be available on parleys.com, which provide by far the best experience when it comes to viewing live-captured talks.
    Afterwards I attended the ZeroTurnaround (JRebel) talk on classloader issues. The rather big room (~300 ppl) was packed and left the impression that many Java developers share a common pain around classloaders. It was a good talk, covering the basics and typical pifalls. The only surprise for me was *how* easily you can end up with a classloader leak.
    In order to improve my fathering skills, I went into Ken Sipe’s talk on “Rocking the Gradle”, where I met Adam Bien. Ken is a great presenter. However, convincing the crowd is a challenge especially as many Maven users seem to suffer from the Stockholm syndrome.
    Then onto “Visualization of Geomaps and Topic Maps with JavaFX 2.0″, which had some interesting visuals captured here.
    For me JavaOne 2011 finished with Jim Clarke and Dean Iverson on GroovyFX, where they made some really good points suggesting that Groovy is the best language to drive the JavaFX 2.0 API.
    As a side note, James Weaver introduced me to Jim Clarke by pointing out “He is from *Canoo*”. Then the discussion went into how well-known Canoo is in the community and that all employees must be true geniuses to achieve so much with so few people :-)
    Fazit: Still, JavaOne is nowhere near where it was before the Oracle acquisition both in terms of size and in terms of being an unparalleled community experience. Distribution all over various hotels just doesn’t feel right. However, meeting friends has been and still remains the most important part of JavaOne and the conference still delivers on that account.
    Important topics were new Java versions, JavaEE (+cloud), and Java for the Desktop with 50+ talks on JavaFX. Whenever the audience was asked about which alternative languages they use, Groovy was the clear winner. It appears that in the mainstream, Groovy has become the default choice for dynamic programming on the JVM.
    The topic of concurrent programming was in my eyes underrepresented. Guillaume and myself had simple usage of GPars in our demos but for such a big and increasingly important topic the coverage should be much more extensive.
    Finally, some visual impressions.
    Good-bye SF
    Dierk Koenig

    Comments Off | Grails, Groovy, Java, JavaFX, JavaOne, Swing | Permalink
    Posted by Dierk

    JavaOne 2011 Wednesday

    October 6th, 2011

    Opinions expressed in this post are totally my own and not necessarily that of my employer.

    Wednesday started with the infamous “scriptbowl”, a competition between various scripting languages. This year the contenters were JRuby, Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. I wondered whether Scala considers itself a scripting language but obviously they either do or just seek the opportunity to be on stage.

    To keep a long story short: Groovy has won this event for the third time in a row! This year the race was tied with Scala. Guillaume presented Groovy in the typical Groovy-idomatic style and explained every single line of his concurrent visual analyzer for Google+ postings. Dick Wall presented only non-idomatic Scala code. I interpret this as: to make Scala appealing you have to make it look like Groovy. Furthermore, he presented Kojo, which is a great interactive learning environment written in Play/Scala. In contrast to all other presentations, this was not specifically created for the scriptbowl, nor was it written by the presenter, nor was it clear how much effort went into it, nor did the audience see a single line the implementation code. How much this skewed the comparison, I leave to everybody’s judgement. The show was good, though.

    I felt a bit sorry for Clojure. It is a great language and deserves a presentation that is more visually appealing to convince the crowd.

    Afterwards, I attended a hands-on lab for “rapid enterprise development with netbeans”, which was essentially creating a Swing app for database CRUD actions. If I remember correctly, I did the exact same task 1997 with JBuilder. It left me with the feeling of “Yes, it works” but it is not less complex than it was 13 years ago.

    Early afternoon Gerrit Grunwald (better known as @hansolo_) presented his work on simplified custom components for Swing. Given that he speaks about an activity that is both utterly important and highly underadvertised he would really deserve speaking at the center stage.

    Graeme Rocher’s great session about Grails, polyglot datastores (hibernate, jpa, redis, mongodb, …), and the cloud was overshadowed by the news that Steve Jobs has died. Accidentally, the demo application was about showing a BBC News stream, which displayed this information live on stage. Both the presenter and the audience were equally touched.

    The day officially ended with a big event at treasure island. I decided to not go there, though, and meet the former Canooey Denis Antonioli in Berkely where we had a great evening.

    Dierk Koenig

    2 Comments | Grails, Groovy, Java, JavaOne, Swing | Permalink
    Posted by Dierk

    J1 Session Blog: Swing Rocks – A Tribute to Filthy Rich Clients

    June 4th, 2009
    The two speakers (Pär Sikö, Martin Gunnarsson) showed off an RSS reader (Feedjii) built with Swing which looked a lot like the pimped up applications of Romain Guy. They started off  by presenting some real world examples of horribly looking Swing applications. Then they revealed their recipe for cool looking Swing applications: subtle effects, smooth animations, and custom components. For each ingredient they showed how surprisingly easy it is to implement it. They also covered the area of performance and gave a few hints on making a user interface really smooth. For this, developers have to look into: hardware acceleration flags, timing issues, caching images, image compatibility, and avoiding unnecessary transparency. They didn’t have a lot of material to talk about, though, and after 45 min they already started taking questions. Therefore, on the one hand I got confirmation again that one can build very nice user interfaces with Swing and it is not too hard provided a good UI designer is at hand. On the other hand I was slightly disappointed because I was expecting a lot more. BTW, there is a blog about developing Feedjii and it can be found here: http://www.swing-rocks.com/

    Comments Off | Java, JavaOne, Swing | Permalink
    Posted by Bruno

    J1 Session Blog: Extreme GUI makeover: Hybrid Swing and JavaFX

    June 4th, 2009

    In the past years the Extreme GUI Makeover sessions proved extremely informative, entertaining and popular. Every year I was curious to see whether they were able to keep up to the level of the previous year or even top it. Last year the session showed first signs of wearing out. This year a completely new team (Amy Fowler, Jasper Potts etc) took over from Romain Guy and Chet Haase. With JavaFX being a big topic at this years JavaOne it was quite obvious to use this for the makeover.

    And they did a pretty good job by taking the Swing-based mail application of the 2006 session and employed JavaFX to pimp it up even more. It is obviously not too hard to integrate Swing components into a JavaFX user interface (the other way round is not really feasible). JavaFX is simply the stage and Swing components can be included as a node (after wrapping them into some kind of JavaFX component). However, hooking up the event handlers is fairly cumbersome and does not really scale for complex applications with lots of event handlers.

    One highlight of the session was the address book of the mail application. They used JavaFX and Java2D to give a 3D impression of turning the pages with the mouse. Visually stunning although the user interface is totally impractical for everyday usage.

    The culmination of the session was certainly their idea of junk mail removal. They were using an animation which launched a rocket and on impact the spam mail exploded and disappeared accordingly. Being both funny and pointless this also perfectly illustrated how easy it is to add animation to a Java application and how difficult it will be to enhance productivity of business applications by means of JavaFX.

    Comments Off | General, JavaFX, JavaOne, Swing | Permalink
    Posted by Bruno

    Interview with Canoo Fellow Dierk König

    June 4th, 2009

     

    Scott Davis interviewed Dierk König, Canoo Fellow and Grails/Groovy-Evangelist for Thirsty Head at blip.tv. In the interview, Dierk gives an inside-view about new Grails improvements, about his JavaOne talk, JavaFX and the impact of Canoo Webtest. Enjoy this interesting chat about “beauty and code”!

     

     

    Comments Off | Events, General, Grails, Groovy, JavaFX, JavaOne, Swing, WebTest | Permalink
    Posted by Felix Schrape

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