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Posted by editor on February 5, 2007 at 7:48 AM PST


A jolt of animated orange for launching SE 6 applets

Setting aside issues of applet viability and installation hassles, it's all but a given that a proper loading screen will assuage your users that the content is being loaded, with an indication of how the startup is going. Thing is, this wasn't really a consistent part of the applet experience prior to Java SE 5 -- on the Mac, you get a static image of a coffee cup with "reload" arrows, and I think other platforms got some other indicator. In SE 5, Sun's VM finally provided a fairly attractive logo and progress bar. Future versions of SE 6 are going to take this an animated step further, as illustrated in Chris Campbell's blog Orange Box: New Java Plugin Animation. Compare the old startup logo:

Java SE 5 applet loading logo

to the new one:

Future Java SE 6 applet loading logo

The latter doesn't show how the animation works -- the vertical swirl appears down the box and then splits it in two by a couple appropriately beveled pixels. But let's let Chris talk about how this was accomplished:

The old animation was already beginning to look a bit dated, so I think we were happy to give the design (and implementation) a much needed makeover. Coleen's new designs were much more sleek and modern looking than the old gray box. And this time they were predominantly bright orange. (Hooray for Sun branding!) The design we settled on looked fantastic, but it was also a bit of a fun challenge for me trying to convert her Photoshop blueprints into Java 2D-isms. Fortunately around that time I had pushed to get LinearGradientPaint (and RadialGradientPaint) included in the JDK, which turned out to be a lifesaver. I also had to figure out how to achieve cheap, efficient drop shadows, glow effects, and soft clipping in Java 2D.

Chris' blog includes an SE6-based Web Start preview of the applet-loading animation, so check it out.

Also in today's Weblogs, Scott Violet has an
Update on Beans Binding (JSR 295):
"Way back in May (YOW!) of last year I blogged on beans binding (JSR 295). While not much progress has been made externally, a ton of progress has been made before the expert group and internally"

Evan Summers has a reply to Bruce Eckel's Flex-advocating "Hybridizing Java" essay, in
Unhybridising RIA development with Swing:
"Java/Swing/Netbeans potentially allows developers to deliver and enhance RIAs easily and quickly, at the rapid pace Web 3.0 technology leaders should and will exhibit. Sure there are engineering problems to be solved. But fortunately there are lots of engineers in the world. It is our nature to want to solve the problems we see, and we will, because we can."

Going back to the new applet loading animation, it's already a topic of discusssion in the Forums, as numeropi has
Feedback about the new orange animation:
"I have some feedback regarding the planned new orange animation. I do not like that just before the applet starts, "Come visit us at java.com" will be displayed. My reasons: - First and most important, it's prompting users to abandon the site that contains the applet. Can you imagine that Adobe would do the same with flash? Do you think webmasters would use flash for interactive media if it prompted users to abandon their sites? IMHO there's enough branding already just watching "Java" during load time. I can see the need for more marketing and branding but distracting the end users will do little to promote the use of Java in public sites."

chris_e_brown has
More feedback about the orange animation:
"Where I'm working, we deliver an applet-based portal (predates the portlet API). There can frequently be 6 or more applets per page, so the orange colour is very aggressive. Maybe it can be made more neutral, or can be a special applet parameter (e.g. com.sun.applet.loadingColor = #CCC)..? The branding is also intrusive when you're selling a branded product and you see the same branding message repeated 6 times in the same screen..."

Meanwhile, forsey85 is looking for a way to
Monitor JAX-WS file upload progress:
"I have a JAX-WS 2.0 webservice which has a operation to upload some binary data via a DataHandler. I was wondering if anyone knew of a way monitor how much of the data has been sent. I have tried assigning a thread to monitor the Input/output streams on the Datahandler but cant see anything. Ideally I just want the client to be able to monitor how much of the file it has uploaded."

This week's Spotlight is on the JSR-296 Swing Application Framework prototype implementation, a small set of Java classes that simplify building desktop applications. The prototype provides infrastructure that's common to most desktop applications: application lifecyle, support for managing and loading resources, support for defining/managing/binding Actions, and persistent session state. The JSR-296 expert group launched this effort in late summer 2006. A prototype implementation, spec, and some small examples are now available. Although the JSR has not reached the "Early Draft" JCP review stage, the expert group has agreed to make the prototype public to give interested members of the Swing community the opportunity to provide feedback. This version is just a snapshot of the ongoing design process, it's likely to change substantially in the coming months.

In Java Today,
the JAX-WS reference implementation project has released version 2.1. The many new features are discussed across a set of new blog entries: Vivek Pandey has an overview of the release in JAXWS 2.1 FCS - Fast and Furious, Kohsuke Kawaguchi discusses its extensibility in JAX-WS RI 2.1! and performance in JAX-WS RI 2.1 benchmark details, Jitendra Kotamraju talks about its new programming paradigm in Tubes in JAX-WS 2.1, and Rama Pulavarthi compiles a list of Useful Goodies for Web Service Developers in JAX-WS 2.1 RI.

BeJUG has posted the video presentation of Stanley Ho's JavaPolis presentation on JSR-277, the Java Module System. As described by a related InfoQ article, "the presentation covers the driving forces for JSR 277 such as classpath and jar hell. It also covers how the module system will be implemented with code examples of JSR 294 super packages and how they will work with JSR 277."

The 109th issue of the Java Tools Community Newsletter is online, featuring tool-related news from around the web, a welcome to a new community project, and a Tool Tip on checking out Roumen Strobl's NetBeans Podcast.

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A jolt of animated orange for launching SE 6 applets

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