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 Amy Fowler's Blog
The Ultimate CraftsmanPosted by aim on June 21, 2009 at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)Some of us are just driven to create; we arn't happy unless we are making something - houses, software, furniture, blogs, chocolate cake. Turns out that software engineering is a pretty good gig for such a person (modulo the perils of skill-set depreciation). And although society has a tendency to associate creativity with artistry, it's often more about craftsmanship, and I inherited this gene from the ultimate craftsman: my Dad.
My Dad (James Moore), Berkeley graduate and electrical engineer employed at the Livermore Lawrence Labratory for 38 years, was (is) a genuine geek. This goes beyond the glasses and pocket protector; he approaches everything with the critical sense of an engineer -- break it down, analyze, build it up. Growing up I don't recall us paying anyone to fix anything, ever. My childhood home is full of his handy work, from little custom shelves to hold his electric razor and gadgets, to a housing for a Lite Brite which includes drawers to sort the translucent colored pegs. His engineering precision influences most of what he does. When he taught me around age 6 to snow ski, the lessons began at his desk, where he drew scale drawings of a chair lift to explain the physics of getting on and off the lift (until then, I'd pictured hopping 15 feet straight down, so this brought relief). Each day he went to work, my mother packed him the same lunch, which included a baggie containing 3 oreo cookies; he always ate two and brought back the third, which was my mother's ingenious way of getting the baggie back. A devoted PC hacker, he wrote BASIC programs to calculate golf club handicaps and when I gave him a copy of Visual BASIC (what program doesn't need a GUI?), he returned it for some low-level software to write his own printer drivers. I think this nuts and bolts approach to life is how he survived raising four daughters. That enduring grin you see in the pictures is likely a direct result of estrogen asphixiation (especially in the 80's,when we were all teenagers) -- even our family dog and cat were girls. Yet there was never a moment where I wondered if he wished I was a boy. He's always showed nothing but pride in his girls (except maybe the time where he chased me around the dining table for what I'm sure was some awful adolescent backtalk -- and I'm certain I deserved it :-). So Dad, whether you were helping me with calculus, rescuing me from college car breakdowns, or explaining the doppler effect, your unwavering love and precision has everything to do with why I'm still an engineer. You taught me to be a craftsman in life. Happy Father's Day! I'll convince you to switch to a mac yet... Insider's Guide to Mixing Swing and JavaFXPosted by aim on June 10, 2009 at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)Injecting the "extreme" into this year's GUI Makeover session at JavaOne, Jasper's finale of blowing up junk email with rocket explosions was really fun and of course completely absurd. 
Looking beyond the antics, our message in the session was actually very practical: You can blend the strengths of Swing and JavaFX to give your Java applications that visual edge that users are coming to expect from modern clients. If you weren't able to attend the session you can download the GUI Makeover slides (I couldn't resisting drawing a mustache & beard on Chet's face in slide 6). If you're a Swing developer who's both skeptical and curious about JavaFX, I've broken down the process into 10 steps for integrating your Swing components into a JavaFX application. Note: We also recognize the need for the inverse (embedding a JavaFX scene into a Swing app), however that is not supported with 1.2 as it requires a more formal mechanism for manipulating JavaFX objects from Java code. The structure of these JavaFX objects is a moving target (for some very good reasons) and we're not ready to lock that down (yet). However,as with most software, this can be hacked (see Rich & Jasper's hack on Josh's blog) but know that you are laying compatibility down on the tracks if you go there. Honestly, you can pull large portions of your Swing GUIs into JavaFX very easily... Layout, Controls, and Hybrids at JavaOnePosted by aim on May 22, 2009 at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)To follow up my article on JavaFX layout, I'll be presenting a section on layout at our JavaOne session on FX UI Controls. At this session, Richard, Jasper, and I will talk in detail about new apis which make it easier to build amazing interfaces:
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July 2009
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Amy Fowler is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and is one of the founding members of the Java Swing GUI Toolkit.
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