Chet Haase's Blog

November 2007 Archives

Review Review

I don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm happy if others happen to toot it for me.

Geertjan Wielenga has posted a review of Filthy Rich Clients on his blog.

If you're still wondering whether this book is for you, check out the review. Geertjan does the best job I've seen yet of describing the content and the reasons why any Swing developer should read it.

Or if you're still wondering what Swing is and what book I'm talking about, then I have no idea what you're doing here to begin with. But I'd encourage you to get the book anyway.

Of Pros and QCons

I spent Wednesday at QCon, in San Francisco, giving a presentation on Java's new consumer focus and participating on a panel with the auspicious title, What Will the Future of Java Development Be?.

I wrote a bit about one of the panel discussions for The Register, so I won't repeat that stuff here. Instead, I wanted to just repeat my favorite question that came up that evening. It was in my original article for The Register, but it got edited out (maybe it was too off-topic). Lucky for me I have this other outlet specifically designed for off-topic topics. So here it is:

A good language changes the way we think about programming. What language change would you like to see that would change the way we think?"

I found the question itself confusing. I mean, if I could imagine something that would change the way I thought, then wouldn't I already think that way? It seemed like I could easily fall into an infinite recursion loop, overrun my stack, and have a brain fault.

All of us had to answer that one, so I mumbled out something about improving the overall platform (not just the language). But mostly, I was busy trying to reboot my brain.

Old JavaOne Presentations Never Die

The presentation that Doug Felt, Phil Race, and I did in 2005 has the best description+diagrams of text measurement in Java 2D that I have seen. It's so useful, in fact, that I put a link to the talk in one of the footnotes of the book (footnote 15, p. 78). (By the way, the great text descriptions were all due to Phil and Doug - I was just blathering on about graphics and animation, which should come as a shock to absolutely nobody).

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the link was dead and that the presentation is no longer available on the JavaOne site. Apparently, there is a 2-year-archive policy, so all of the 2005 presentations are no longer stored. Maybe they figure that content that old can't possibly be relevant anymore, but for presentations on APIs that live longer than 2 years, that's not necessarily true.

Anyway, I am posting the talk here mostly so that I can post a hopefully more permanent link in a corrected footnote (for the third printing, which is apparently going to press soon!). But I encourage you to take a look at the presentation if you're interested in text measurement (or Graphics Effects or Text Rendering or Printing, which we also cover in the slides). People that follow my blog and book will see some earlier versions of Filthy Rich topics in my slides. For example, the original work in Animated Transitions came out of work related to this presentation - it just took a bit more time to settle down into the utility library that is discussed in the book and published on the project site. I was already thinking about filthy rich content; I just needed a catchy name for it...

Here's the presentation: Advanced Java 2D for Desktop Applications.

Enjoy.

Submit a JavaOne Proposal NOW!

The JavaOne Call for Papers deadline always sneaks up on me. It's like jet lag; one minute you're productively cranking out code, then suddenly you're asleep on the keyboard, drooling on the spacebar.

Like previous years, we want to encourage as much external participation in the conference as possible. We know there are great Desktop Java applications being written and deployed out in the real world; we'd like you to come talk about them at the conference. Case studies, techniques, tricks, in-depth discussions of technologies, frameworks and architectures for productive development, whizzy cool effects - anything that others want to learn about is fair game.

You only have until November 16th (that's next Friday for anyone currently time-confused by the Daylight Savings Time switch last weekend), so get your abstracts in now. Submitting a proposal isn't that much work - you just need to put enough information in the abstract and the outline in order for the track team to be able to understand what you're covering, how your going to do it, and why people would want to attend the talk.

So wake up, wipe the drool off the keyboard, and submit that proposal. Help us create and present a great Desktop track this year!

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