LinuxWorld Tradeshow Shows Desktop Java

A few weeks ago I attended LinuxWorld up in San Francisco. I marched around the tradeshow and took notes about what I saw, notably the impressive collection of desktop Java applications on display. If I was a good blogger or even a disciplined one, I would have immediately collected my impressions and published them. Sadly I'm easily distracted and rarely disciplined and so my little collection of observations has been gathering dust. Just now I'm sitting on an airplane bound for San Jose and the person seated in front of me has graciously (and inexplicably) kept his seat upright, leaving enough room for my hulking laptop to open. So it's time to get this little item written.

HP has a new storage rack named HP StorageWorks NAS 8000 which comes with a Swing administration UI deployed as an applet. In addition to displaying and setting administration parameters it allows to bring up a performance monitor that graphically displays parameters like network traffic etc. The representative I talked with said the engineering team used Swing because they really wanted to do some "hardcore coding". I'm happy to report that they've produced a nice GUI however it's always troubling to hear this kind of work described as challenging. We need to find ways to make it easier.

I saw a bunch of nice looking Swing GUIs in the Veritas booth and also in Dell's booth. Dell was showing the Veritas Cluster Manager front-end. Most of the Veritas administration front-ends were Swing, some of them looked pretty slick.

Computer Associates had a nice Swing GUI for their "eTrust AntiVirus App". The CA representative on the floor showed me a similar and much older Motif GUI running on Solaris. I voted for using the new Java GUI on Solaris, I'll look for that next year.

Appro was one of the many companies showcasing a big dark intimidating rack of servers and storage. They've got a very good looking remote management GUI for their "BladeDome" (even the name sounds ominous) HPC product.

Novell was showing their Swing GUI for the "GroupWise" Personal Information Manager (PIM) front-end. Apparently they've got a native Win32 PIM and they use the Java version to reach the Mac/Linux/Solaris markets.

I talked with a very tired but very friendly and helpful representative from Arkeia about the very futuristic Java front-end they've built for their backup system. It looks more like a custom MP3 player than a backup admin console - definitely the most exotic admin console I've seen.

GenaWare is a small map visualization company. They've got Swing client called "GeoVisJ" that based on a custom vector graphics map renderer. The GUI isn't going to win any beauty contests but map data is always interesting, and they've got a lot of it.

I'm sure you'd like to see screenshots of some of these apps. We'll try and collect a nice set in an upcoming Swing Sightings column. Don't miss the current column (yes, this is a shameless plug), you'll find it here on the Swing Connection site at http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc .