Chet Haase's Blog

JavaOnederful Desktop Sessions

I've been meaning to write about JavaOne for some time, but it's just one of the many things I haven't gotten to, like commenting my code and cleaning out the gutters. I thought about waiting until after the conference, when I will have a bit more time, but it seems like it'd be slightly more useful to put this out there now, instead. So here goes.

First of all, check out a video interview with Richard Bair and myself that just hit the web today. The video URL is linked above, or you can go to the main page at http://java.sun.com/javaone and see the various interviews posted there. In our conversation, Richard and I talk about the current state of Desktop in Java SE 6, some feature work currently underway, and highlights on some of the upcoming talks at the JavaOne conference. It's a lot to cover in 7 minutes and 50 seconds. Good thing I had plenty of coffee that morning.

Next, I thought I'd write down a relatively brief and completely subjective take on the interesting conference sessions.  So here is:

Sessions That Chet Doesn't Want to Miss at JavaOne 2007

1) Filthy Rich Clients (The JavaU Course): Monday morning
I'd better be at this one, since I'm speaking at it, along with Romain Guy. This should be a fun session. For one thing, I'm looking forward to having some current Desktop content in the JavaU curriculum. Also, I'm looking forward to spending more time (about 3 hours) on this subject than can in a regular conference session.  We'll go into some of the fundamentals behind Swing, 2D, and animation, and get into some of the advanced rendering and effects topics as well.  We can't do the entire book's worth of material in 3 hours (or if we could, why did it take us six months to write it?), but we'll dive deep into various topics.

The catch is that the JavaU day (Monday) is an additional cost on top of the core conference. But if you happen to be in town and are spending a wad on the trip already, hopefully it makes sense to blow a bit more to learn something in-depth in these tutorial sessions. Our course is only in the morning, so you'll have a chance to hit one of the other JavaU sessions for the afternoon.

2) Filthy Rich Clients: Talk Dirty to Me. Wednesday@10:55, Friday@2:50
Again, I list this talk because I'm supposed to be on stage with Romain giving them, so I'd better not miss them. But it should be fun. The talk will be different from last year. With a whole book's material to choose from, there's plenty to discuss and demonstrate. Graphics, animation, effects, and generally whizzy stuff, with lots of code examples and demos to show how you can do the same things in your Swing applications. And maybe Romain will entertain us with French poetry or a mime act this time (although I personally hope not).

3) Desktop Java Technology Today: Tuesday@10:50
This session (which I'm also supposed to be giving, thus it's another can't-miss for me) is going to give a quick glimpse of where Desktop Java SE is at today, then show you where we're going in the future. If you want to get an overview of the Desktop platform and the JavaOne Desktop track's talks, this is a good way to start the week.

The timing of this talk is interesting to me. It's right after Rich Green's keynote, and before Bob Brewin's technical keynote. You could think of this talk as the keynote intermission, but without the band, concession stands, and wardrobe malfunctions. Or, you could think of this as a Desktop sandwhich, where the keynotes are the essential pieces of bread, holding together the real meat of the content: The Desktop Pastrami sandwich, as it were. Expect some rye humor.

4) Extreme GUI Makeover 2007: Wednesday@2:50
This is one of our most successful talks in the past couple of years, based on attendance,  survey feedback, and highly subjective opinion. The crew returns this year to show ... well, you'll just have to see.  Should be fun and educational. Good how-tos on making cool, dynamic Swing applications.

5) 3-D Earth Visualization with NASA World Wind: Thursday@10:55
This is a very cool project by NASA that shows the power of Java and JOGL for writing amazing, rich graphical applications for the web.  Check it out.

6) Being Productive with Swing: Wednesday@1:30, Thursday@9:35
Ben Galbraith is one of the JavaOne 'Rock Stars'. He always gives a good talk, explaining Swing application development and architecture in a very clear, entertaining, and informative way. Join him as as he covers some architectural fundamentals in this talk. Also be sure to check out his Debugging and Optimization talk.

7) Easy Deployment is Finally Here: Tuesday@4:40
Join JavaOne 'Rock Star' Ethan Nicholas as he talks about some of the very cool stuff in store for desktop developers in the deployment space. We are addressing some of the major issues in application deployment and launching, and you will want to see what we're doing and how you can take advantage of it.

8) JSR 296: The Swing Application Framework: Tuesday@3:20
This JSR feature is coming along nicely in a current java.net project. Join veteran speaker and Swing architect Hans Muller and Joshua Marinacci as they tell you how it all works and how it's going to make your life nearly perfect in the future. Or at least how it will improve the Swing-based portion of your life.  We can't fix your relationship problems, although it's worth pointing out that making Swing development easier means that you can spend less time coding and more time communicating. Or playing games. Or just writing more, cool Swing applications.

9) Form Follows Function (F3): Wednesday@4:10, Thursday@1:30
If you've followed Chris Oliver's blog on F3 (http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver) , you've seen the cool things that you can do with the language. Come to this session and learn more. See how quickly you can use F3 to code up GUI and graphical applications.

10) User Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future; Good, Bad, and Ugly: Wednesday@9:35
If anyone saw Joe Winchester's talk last year, you know how funny and inciteful he can be. I'm looking forward to what he can do with this 'rich' topic this year.

11) BOFs
Don't forget about the BOFs. These sessions can easily rival the best of the technical sessions. There are basically 2 kinds of BOFs in our track: "Meet the ..." panels and mini-sessions. Both are good session types, but with different intents and formats. For example, Shannon Hickey's "Advanced Swing Drag and Drop" BOF will be just like a technical session, just a bit later in the day. The "Meet the Swing, AWT, and i18n Teams" BOF, on the other hand, is a panel discussion and general Q&A session with many engineers from these teams. BOFs tend to be a more intimate atmosphere (no lingerie required, however). They are a great place to find out more about your favorite API or product, or to ask that niggling question that's been on your mind, or to meet and talk with the engineers on the projects and products that you depend upon.

12) Everything else in the Desktop Track, Too
I did not enjoy hand-picking sessions out of the track for this blog, because I was heavily involved in helping to select all of the talks for the track this year, and feel strongly that all of them are going to be good. There are great architectural talks by Sun and non-Sun folks. There are deep-dives into core Swing areas like threading and the Beans Binding JSR. There are fantastic case studies from successful companies using Java Desktop technology. There are talks on frameworks that can make your development lives easier. And so on and so on, through the 45 sessions and BOFs in our track. So don't see the handful above as an indicator of a full agenda for the conference. Instead, see it as a teaser and be sure to check out the full Desktop track content to make up your own mind of where you want to be that week.

13) Oh Right - There's Non-Desktop Sessions at JavaOne, Too
Everything above is All About the Desktop. This is simply because I've been so busy working with the Desktop track and my own sessions that I haven't had time to check out the other conference tracks. But I know for a fact that there is great stuff going on, from another Puzzlers talk, to discussions on OpenJDK, to talks on SE currents and futures, to performance sessions, to tools talks, to ... well, to all of the wonderful stuff that usually happens at the conference.

My suggestion to you: clone yourself at the beginning of the week, send your clones into the different tracks, take it all in all week, and then do a merge on the weekend. It'll probably cause a splitting headache, but it'll be worth it.

Comments

• Disappointed that there is still no attention on Java media. How can Java go with rich client without multimedia support? We have waiting so long to see a better JMF.

  Posted by: jdevp2 on April 24, 2007 at 06:07 PM

• I agree with jdevp2, has Sun forgot about media??? They use to be part of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance, so what happened??? This alliance help bring about the MPEG-4 standard along with Apple. So, again has Sun forgot about media?

  Posted by: badapple on April 24, 2007 at 10:21 PM

• 
  I can't imagine why I left a discussion of media out of a blog on interesting talks at JavaOne. Maybe I should just start all blogs out with a discussion of media, so that readers know that we haven't forgotten about it.

  
  Meanwhile: There actually is stuff to say about media, and we will be talking about some of it at the conference, such as in our Desktop Overview session. I thinkn I'll save any other tidbits for the show. Or maybe if I write a piece on graphics performance, I'll throw in something about media. Or in my next joke blog. Or when I do another piece on the book.

  Clearly, there's a media frenzy here.

  Posted by: chet on April 25, 2007 at 08:33 AM

• Um, yep. Media (Ogg and tapping into underlying platform codecs) is very important.

  Meanwhile, thanks for the review of other interesting topics. (And at risk of causing trouble, I'd like to recommend staying away from even slightly off color joking. Edgy might seem cool, but it's better to stay away from there.)

  Thanks for the desktop focus. It's fun stuff.
  

  Posted by: tompalmer on April 25, 2007 at 08:59 AM

• 
  tompalmer: Good point, and thanks for trying to mediate the discussion. My policy is to stay the heck away from food fights on my blog comments. I just couldn't help myself this time since it was such a tangent from the blog subject. And another policy I have is to never miss the opportunity for a joke...

  
  In case anyone feels like flaming me for my insensitivity toward the subject (Media, of course): I agree that the platform has been remiss in that area for some time now. I would like to see that change. I just didn't happen to address it in the context of this blog about JavaOne sessions. Come to the conference, see what we're up to, and let's talk about it. I can't think of a meatier subject to discuss...
  

  Posted by: chet on April 25, 2007 at 10:08 AM

• Thanks for the clarification (and my comment on "off color" actually were more about items in your main content than your reply to the other comments - but again, I don't want to be too pushy). And as I said, I appreciate the coverage and the good work on desktop Java. Maybe someday I'll even go to a JavaOne, but for now the summaries (and even previews) are helpful to me since usually I just see these things in text (interest contrast after my expressed interest in media - just that I usually prefer online tech in text - I like media more for entertainment).

  Posted by: tompalmer on April 25, 2007 at 11:57 AM

• No, media is not such a tangent from the blog subject. Thinking so indicates only that your view of the desktop is fare to narrow and limited. Granted, the view "desktop .EQ. fancay GUI" is one very common at Sun.

  You wrote that you were involved in selecting the talks for the desktop track. Then you are a legitimate target for critic when it comes to the selection. You have forgotten a lot of things. Are there desktop sessions about other desktop related technologies? E.g. handling of removable storage media? USB? Serial interfaces? Firewire? Local printing? Application management? HID device handling (graphics tables, joysticks, pens, etc.)? Sound? Tool integration? Datatype handling and binding? All the many things that make up a real desktop experience, like being able to see, control and interact with all that is build-in and plugged into the desktop computer. No? I only see GUI stuff and particular GUI hype in your desktop track. Calling it the GUI track would be honest.

  Posted by: ewin on April 25, 2007 at 12:07 PM

• Chet, I will be going to JavaOne this year (my fourth time actually). While your session pick is impressive, and I will make an effort to go to all of them, that's not all what I wanna try to get out from this conference. What I am really hoping to get out from this conference is the vision, and the strategy for bringing the Java desktop to the next level. Although not directly mentioned in any of the sessions, Apollo, and WPF will be the elephants in the room, and the audience will be looking to find out what is Sun's answer here. You can tell me all the great things in each one of these sessions, but unless you have great story to tell, and and overall strategy on how to get all these pieces together into a comprehensive platform like the ones I mentioned, the message will be lost. Quite frankly, I care a lot more about this vision than what the latest hack in Applet-JAX is.
  In the Java desktop it has always been the case where you had all these great pieces of technology, but the whole package that was supposed to bring all these pieces together into one nice, powerful, usable system was nowhere to be seen. So I hope that this year the emphasis will be on the vision of delivering this total package. And let's hope it has a catchy name too. JEE already showed the way for the server side, I am sure you guys can pull it off on the client.

  Posted by: mikeazzi on April 25, 2007 at 01:16 PM

• I agree fully with ewin’s view on desktop. There are a lot of things with desktop other than GUI. Frankly, I think that there is just too much focus on Swing GUI than it is needed. In fact, Swing does not have looking problem. A well written Swing application looks just as good as native applications.

  What we need are the more features that can integrate well with native platform. We still don’t see the ‘type ahead’ feature in JFileChooser. The ‘Systray’ is a good start even it is still based on AWT and works with only ‘PopupMenu’.

  What makes a good desktop application is not a fancy GUI but the functionalities and the easy of use. The software ‘pkzip’ was DOS based but was a killer app back then. The Java ‘look & feel’ has been talked over 10 years and still is being focused a lot today. Why spending a lot of efforts to create solutions for issues that are not issues. Swing DOES NOT have look problem.

  The media, application deployment, desktop integration, desktop and web applications integration should be the main focus on JavaOne not the fancy GUI. After 10 years, where is JMF, where is Java Applet ? With Microsoft and Adobe are battling for who will be the next major media player, Sun is here still talking about fancy GUI.
  

  Posted by: jdevp2 on April 25, 2007 at 03:44 PM

• That's Silverlight now instead of WPF/E. Personally, I think Silverlight isn't an elephant yet. I don't have a Windows computer at home or at work that's recent enough to run it. Maybe I should try it on my PowerPC Mac. But if MS doesn't continue to require the latest OS versions, then in a few years it may give Flash/Apollo a run for its money.

  Posted by: tompalmer on April 25, 2007 at 04:18 PM

• ewin & others: I was also involved in picking the sessions for the Desktop Track at JavaOne and guess what? None of the stuff you are talking was even PROPOSED. You want to see those topics covered at conferences? So do we. Send (good) abstracts.

  Oh and the list that Chet shows here is only what he finds interesting. There are many other sessions, some about bindings, using native resources, writing large desktop applications...

  Posted by: gfx on April 26, 2007 at 09:29 PM

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