Eitan Suez's Blog

March 2007 Archives

Desktop Matters Retrospective

An essential ingredient for a community is periodic face-to-face meetings. Although events such as JavaOne have served the purpose in the past, this event was stricly about the Desktop, and (unlike JavaOne) was very small and most intimate.

I most enjoyed getting to meet a number of java.net bloggers such as Kirill Grouchnikov, the author of the Substance look and feel, and members of the Sun Swing team including Shannon Hickey, Chet Haase, Hans Muller, and Richard Bair. Of particular interest to me was the chance to meet people behind independent open source frameworks such as Wolf Paulus, the author of SwixML. It's also always a pleasure to revisit with old friends Ben Galbraith, Dion Almaer, and Scott Delap, whom I know from speaking tours with NFJS (no fluff just stuff).

What I value most about such conferences is the chance to connect with the community, the people who were drawn to this conference, speakers and attendees alike, because of their involvement with desktop technologies in some respect. They came to share and discuss. This was not a dead audience. Talks were interactive, and Ben made sure to heckle speakers that didn't get their fair share of questions.

Personally, I was very humbled by the feedback I received about my talk. There's nothing more encouraging to one's work than getting positive feedback so personally.

I enjoyed informal conversations with fellow speaker Kai Toedter of Siemens, and Etienne Studer who delivered two presentations: the first on the ULC product from Canoo (which imho rocks), and the second on IntelliJ IDEA's GUI designer where Etienne's facility in the environment made me reconsider my own intimacy with the product. It was also an honor to get to meet and listen to the people behind JIDE. David Qiao gave a great talk.

So, now that DM is over, and now that I'm home, I can finally say that I feel like I know at least a few members of my community, and it's a good feeling.

All sorts of matter..

I'm excited about the upcoming Desktop Matters conference, which takes place March 8-9 this week in San Jose, CA. This conference is a first of its kind, focusing on Swing and other desktop technologies.

The conference is organized such that it has a single track, which I very much like. As much as it's nice to have a choice of talks to attend, I believe there's more value in everyone being in on what goes on, in sharing a common experience. It's not unlike how TV used to be. I recall a place and time where there was only a single national television station. If a movie was on, everyone watched it, and there's something nice about that.

Personally, I will be attending the conference as a speaker: I will be showing off my project: JMatter. It's been a little over six months since I announced the project as open-source. Our mailing list has grown to over 100 users and the feedback has been extremely positive. Some of my favorites are: "you should be speaking about this at JavaPolis" and "the documentation is outstanding." Speaking of the documentation, I have recently expanded it and it now stands at roughly 200 pages. The manual is now available in print as a self-published book from lulu.com.

I am looking forward to meeting the members of the rich client community at Desktop Matters. Sometimes as developers we overlook the importance of attending a conference. Listening to a talk or speaking with a colleague can be a catalyst for new ideas, and reinvigorates us when we get back to coding. Perhaps I'll see you there.

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