Chet Haase's Blog

September 2007 Archives

Shutup About the Book, Already

I have nothing to say about our Filthy Rich Clients book today. But other people do.

InfoQ posted an in-depth review of the book this week. It's a great review overall, although I take issue with some points (apparently I'm "not adverse to the odd corny-joke or two." Hmph.) It's great to see that people are enjoying the book.

They also posted an excerpt of Chapter 14, which is an introduction to the Timing Framework. So if you've been pining for more recent documentation on that library (older articles on it predate a lot of the refactoring and new features that came in a year ago), you might check that out.

Also, JavaRanch is hosting Romain and I this week on their Swing forum. We're trolling the forum all week, answering questions and generally making nuisances of ourselves. Apparently, there's a drawing for free books from the folks who post there. I hope I win one!

Aversion 1.0: It's About Time

I just posted Version 1.0 of the Timing Framework to the project site; check it out for the latest, stable version of the library.

There actually haven't been that many changes to the library of late. Partly, this was by design: I didn't want to cause too much contortion between fully documenting the library in Filthy Rich Clients and actually releasing the book. But also, since a major refactoring of the code in late 2006, the library has been relatively stable (and useful).

So if you've been using the previous version or two, you will probably not notice any differences. But I figured it was important to declare a 'real' version 1.0, rather than simply incrementing the pre-1.0 version numbers. It's indicative of a lilbrary which, while not yet complete in all of the features that I and others would like to see, is at least solid, stable, and useable in its current state.

So for anyone waiting for a real version, go get it while it's hot. For those interested in the latest version of the project, or in previous releases, check out the project site at http://timingframework.dev.java.net. For people just interested in the library and javadocs, I added convenience links to the downloads for version 1.0 to the book's website at http://filthyrichclients.org . 

There are clearly more capabilities that make sense to add to the library in future releases. For example, I've been toying with the idea of an overall "Timeline" for some time, but it just hasn't made it into the library yet.  Also, I would like to tweak some of the default assumptions, such as having non-linear interpolation by default; linear makes sense from an analytical standpoint, but tends to produce unrealistic animations, so it makes a poor default choice.

But I think that these things can wait. First we get this version out there, then we continue to improve it. It's the way of all things - first you release your initial, working product out into the world, then people start using it, then you improve it in parallel. This approach has gotten us from dumping human waste into the streets to today's lighted, heated, auto-opening toilets. It's also given us such marvels as the English Muffin Splitter, saving countless seconds of our lives and preventing the inevitable and aesthetically displeasing uneven muffin halves. Now, we'll apply this technique it to the moving target of animation libraries.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.