Rich Internet Applications (RIA) » Swing

JavaOne 2011 Thursday and wrap-up

Dierk — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 05:15:10 +0000

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

JavaOne 2011 Wednesday

Dierk — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:11:44 +0000

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

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

Bruno — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:12:08 +0000

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/

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

Bruno — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:19:38 +0000

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.

Interview with Canoo Fellow Dierk König

Felix Schrape — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:36:31 +0000

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”!

Canoo @ WJAX/SOACon 2008

andreas — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:11:32 +0000

This is just a quick note about the WJAX Java developer conference that take place last week in Munich.

The conference program was quite balanced and beside the main stream topics about SOA (ServiceOrientedArchitektur – represented by the SOACon conference), Spring, Application Security and OSGi there was a huge number of different topics, which were addressed by several talks.

Most interesting from my point of view were following sessions:

Keynote from Jonas Jacobi: Re-architecting the Web with HTML 5 Communication.
Talk from Karsten Lentzsch: Efficient design of swing UI’s.
Talk from Angelika Langer: Java programming in the age of multicore.
Talk from Dierk Koenig: RESTful JEE with Grails.

Canoo was exhibiting on a booth, which gave the great opportunity to present and talk about our products UltraLightClient (ULC), the just released language application for the IPhone (using canoo.net), our demo for the new JavaFX platform and fancy UltraLightClient / Swing rich client applications. In addition Canoo members used the presence to keep in touch with existing costumers, contact new ones or presented the company to potential new staff members.

Canoo Online Quiz

All the visitors on the booth and all other interested software developers had and still have the possibility to join an online quiz. Its possible to win an iPod touch or one of ten ‘Groovy in Action’ books. The quiz can be found at www.canoo.com/quiz and will end at the 30.11.2008.

Dierk König, Canoo fellow and author of the ‘Groovy in Action’ book, was holding a groovy workshop and was giving a talk about RESTful JEE with Grails.

Scene Graph library announced at JavaPolis 2007

Daniel — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:55:23 +0000

One of the many interesting talks I attended at the JavaPolis 2007 conference was the Swinging RIA talk. At the end of the talk Chet Haase announced the brand new Java Scene Graph library. Scene Graph gives you a new way to implement your visual output in Swing. It will replace the Jazz library that provides the Java2D stuff in the current JavaFX implementation. In the current release, the API is a little bit verbose but I expect this to change as the API is not final yet.

How does Scene Graph work? With Scene Graph, instead of subclassing a Swing component and providing your Java2D drawing instructions in a custom paint() method, you build up a data structure that declares your visual output, i.e old Java2D is the procedural approach to do graphics, whereas Scene Graph is the declarative approach.

How does this look in practice? In Scene Graph you amazingly build up a scene graph! Each scene graph is composed of nodes and each node represents a graphics operation, e.g.

Painting a primitive
Performing an effect
Doing a transformation
Playing an animation

So, for painting text, instead of

 protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
  super.paintComponent(g);
  
  Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) g.create();
  g2.setFont(new Font("Arial", Font.BOLD, 128));
  g2.setRenderingHint(KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING, VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON);
  g2.drawString("Java2D", 50, 150);
  g2.dispose();
}

you will have

  SGText result = new SGText();
  result.setText("Scene");
  result.setFont(new Font("Arial", Font.BOLD, 128));
  result.setAntialiasingHint(VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON);
  result.setLocation(new Point(50, 180));

My impression is that a programmer familiar with Java2D is immediately productive with the Scene Graph library. Great! And as a bonus he gets good effect and animation support for free! Wow! I hope this is just a first step to:

Powerful effect libraries
Good animation libraries
Visual scene graph tools
Integrations into existing visual tools like PhotoShop
…

Another thing that makes building good-looking Swing applications easy! Good!

Jazoon Thursday

Sibylle — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:05:27 +0000

Not being able to attend the conference yesterday, I not only missed some interesting talks, but also Bruce Willis in “Die Hard 4″ ;-(

In today’s keynote, Neal Gafter of Google talked about the possibilities of closures and how they can reduce the amount of boilerplate code and increase the readability of software. In addition, by integrating closures into Java some language feature requests would change to library (API) feature requests, which have a much greater chance to become included.

Danny Coward from Sun showed the road map regarding Java SE and Java EE. He also explained how open source complements the JCP process.

Today was also filled by a lot of networking. That’s what I like about conferences, you meet new people. And people you only know by email suddenly get a face and a voice.

One of them was Kaspar von Gunten. He gave a talk about Process-based Software Development today. He showed how the process modelled approach can change the development of software towards end-user programming. And how this approach integrates with RIA. They also showed a Software Demo of their product Xpert.ivy. The new release of Xpert.ivy is based on Eclipse and a graphical process designer. In addition it uses ULC Visual Editor to generate the UI for the RIA front-end of these processes. Quite impressive. Xpert.ivy 4.0 will be shipped in 2008.

I didn’t get much out of the talk about Jackrabbit. I almost got discouraged to use Jackrabbit, being warned to be patient and reading the spec to get the information about how to use the API.

For the closing session they decided to do some lightning speaks: Everybody could speak up for 2 minutes. Neal Gafter started showing some optical illusions from the Java puzzler book. Then Felipe Gaucho presented his footprint.dev.java.net project. We were then given the elevator story of the semantic web – basically everything is replaced with URI. Then somebody told us good reasons why to attend Jazoon 2008 (reasons like Euro 08 or because the weather will be better). And then we learned what we should read to become a better Java developer:

Joe Armstrong’s thesis: Concurrency oriented languages.
Functional languages explained.
Understand your manager: One minute manager meets the monkeys.
Shell scripting (because there are so many bad shell scripts around)

After that Gregory Murray showed how to impress managers: Do rapid prototyping with Jmaki. Some other guys followed. I was actually pretty amazed how much you can say in 2 minutes.

That was about it. Thank you to all who made this event happen!

Mixing Ajax Swing and Flash: Demos and Source Code available

Sibylle — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:20:01 +0000

For all who were there, thanks for attending. For all those who couldn’t come, the slides are available now (in English):

if you are interested in the topic go have a look at the demos and check out the source code:

Demos:

Integration Flash in Swing: JDIC HybridStore
Integrating Ajax in Swing: Swing Google Map

The source code contains an Eclipse project file and a build script, which allows you to build it yourself (after having adjusted the build.properties):

Flash in Swing: hybridstore-src.zip
Ajax in Swing: swinggooglemap-src.zip

Enjoy!

Canoo at Jazoon 07

admin — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:23:23 +0000

Sibylle Peter and Matthias Huber will be presenting at next week’s Jazoon in Zurich:

Tuesday, 26th June 2007, 16:40 – 17:20, Arena 5, Sihl City.

on “Mixing AJAX, Swing, and Flash”

Currently a number of different Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies are emerging, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In many cases a combination of technologies can be used to meet application requirements. This session shows, based on examples, how various technologies such as AJAX, Swing and Flash can be integrated into one application.