Chet Haase's Blog

My JavaPolis07 Slides

I just returned (after a couple of long and fun flights, described on my other blog posting) from JavaPolis, a fantastic conference on all things Java (and some not) in Antwerp, Belgium.

I know what you're thinking: "I wish I could visit northern Europe in December. It's such a gray, wet, cold time of year." And you're right. I found Antwerp particularly inviting to visit with all of the warmest clothes I own; light, cotton articles that are able to sustain freezing California temperatures down to nearly 65 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's true that JavaPolis does not suffer the weather distractions of events in other cities such as San Francisco, Orlando, or Duluth. It's like what a friend of mine said who worked for a large software company in Redmond, Washington. Everyone there works long hours because, well, there's not much reason to go outside between, like, September and June. So you might as well stay in the office and keep hacking. At JavaPolis, you might as well attend another session. Or have another Belgian beer.  Try the Lambic. Or the Geuze. Or the Kriek (cherry-flavored Geuze), if you can find one that's not too sweet.

You should try to attend next year, but register early - it sold out this year. It definitely has the highest chair-comfort-per-Euro of any conference I've been to . Swank movie theaters are awesome for this kind of event. Unless you're the presenter, in which case you have the distinct impression that the entire audience is sleeping through your talk because everyone's settled so comfortably and quietly into their seats.

I'll let other bloggers cover the spectrum of what they saw at the conference. I will just stick to posting my presentations here in case anyone's interested. Note that the Scene Graph and Filthy Makeover sessions will eventually be online in video form at parleys.com; think of these presentations as placeholders until the real deal is posted.

Scene Graph: This presentation was at the end of Richard Bair's university day session, entitled "Swinging RIAs." It's an introduction to the new Scene Graph project posted on java.net, which is a module of the Java FX platform and is now available in early early [early] access form for Java developers.

Filthy Makeover: This presentation was a combination of prior Filthy Rich Clients and as Extreme GUI Makeover talks (from the past couple of JavaOne conferences). The talk covered a sampling of filthy rich techniques and then showed them in action in the context of larger applications from the GUI Makeover talks. Then I walked through some code in the editor to show how, when you get right down to it, the code to enable the effects in real applications is pretty darn close to the code as described for filthy rich clients. The video for this presentation should be particularly interesting, or at least more involved than the slides here, since much of the new content for the talk was in the interactive demos and code walkthroughs, which are represented in this slide deck by less informative "Demo" slides.

Future Java Consumer Releases: This BOF was about the upcoming Update N and Java FX releases, and discussed the various features going into these releases. There won't be a video of this talk (BOF's don't get that special treatment), but the slides are hopefully self-explanatory.

Comments

• Glad to hear somebody else complaining about the weather :-) Hopefully JavaPolis could be held in October or November next year (I think they'll submit a poll). BTW, if you left just after JavaPolis was over you missed the nice chill wave of the following days :-) on my return trip through France I ever experienced -10 minimum and -3 maximum :-( even though with shining sun (this made for some very good photos with all the countryside frozen, tough).

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on December 21, 2007 at 11:20 AM

• Chet, I enjoyed your presentations, you have a good style and I liked the demos. About the "Filthy Makeover" presentation--one piece of advice: drop it. Those guys who wrote Filthy Rich Clients have cornered the market, and even if you don't get sued for infringing some trademark they have, you'll end up like Schopenhauer trying to give lectures at the same time as Hegel; no one will show up. I suggest you contact the Filthy Rich Client guys and see if you can license their work, I think they have a "filthy rich presentation kit" which you can buy mail-order to make your own presentations. Good luck! Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on December 22, 2007 at 03:13 AM

• Patrick:

  Thanks for the advice. I had thought that I was safe, infringing on their turf in the hinterlands of Antwerp, but I've already received a Cease and Desist notice from their lawyers. Man, what jerks.

  
  I'm thinking of spinning up my own franchise to avoid overlapping with theirs. Current ideas include "Disgusting Fat Clients" and "Awfully Bloated Applications." I'm having my trademarking team chase these down now.

  
  Chet.
  

  Posted by: chet on December 22, 2007 at 06:19 AM

• Chet,

  Can you please post a blog explaining (hopefully through screenshots) what would happen if Nimbus were to become the default L&F? I know you guys say it isn't backwards compatible but I'm finding it hard to believe the negative impact would outweigh the benefits. Is it that noticeable?

  Posted by: cowwoc on December 22, 2007 at 06:29 PM

• cowwoc:

  Jasper Potts (one of the folks working on Nimbus) pointed out that you might want to check out NetBeans on Nimbus to see some of the potential problems:

  
  http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=251450

  
  Jasper also mentioned that they strove for compatibility with Nimbus, but when faced with a choice between compatibility and looking good & modern, they opted for looks. Ocean took the other approach, so it's definitely compatible, but the looks suffer accordingly.

  
  The short answer is: Nimbus may work well for your app (and we certainly hope that it does), but it may not work for any random app that was written around a different look & feel (such as the NetBeans screenshot referred to above). So we cannot enable it as the default look & feel unless we want to just break some apps out there that aren't expecting the change.

  
  Chet
  

  Posted by: chet on January 04, 2008 at 01:10 PM

• Something I haven't heard much about with the consumer JRE is smooth integration with the browser. I've seen a number of issues in the Java plugin that I don't see in flash that I haven't heard being fixed. Can you tell me if anyone is working on these:
  - java applets sit in a heavy-weight container causing them to ignore the CSS Z-index. HTML cannot overlap applets causing issues with DHTML dialogs and popups.
  - Resizing an applet dynamically in javascript may or may not cause the applet to restart depending on the browser version
  - Transparency in applets
  - Custom (non-Sun) loading screens
  Thanks

  Posted by: bryanyoung on January 06, 2008 at 10:52 AM

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