Gregg Sporar's Blog

JavaOne Tokyo, Day One

I arrived late to the keynote session - but I did get there in time to hear David Rivas sing the praises of the NetBeans IDE Mobility Pack. He was describing the current state of and future predictions for Java mobile development.

He was followed by John Pampuch and Mark Hapner whose comments have been summarized very nicely by John O'Conner, saving me the time of typing up my notes. :-)

I took a break for lunch and then attended two afternoon sessions. The first one was "Shale: The Next Struts," by Craig McClanahan. He did a great job of providing an introduction to the framework, which provides handy features for Java Server Faces developers. Since I don't know anything about Shale, I learned quite a bit (Shale is implemented as a filter, it enhances the JSF framework instead of replacing it, etc.). I could not help but be pleased that he was using the NetBeans IDE (the 5.0 beta) for his demos.

After that it was time to swing back over to the world of desktop applications. Scott Violet and Hans Muller did a session called "Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 1: Lookin' Good." They demonstrated how to transform a Swing application from plain-Jane to really cool. They used a chat client for the sample application. I can honestly say it was fun to watch. Their colleague Romain Guy has a screen snapshot of the Buddy List dialog in this blog entry. There was an audible reaction from the audience when they did a drag-n-drop demo that looked like animation - as a buddy entry was being moved the buddy that would be under it if it were dropped would tilt down out of the way to make room. For more information on cool Swing stuff like this, check out JavaDesktop.org.

From there I went back to work. I met with Inyoung Cho and Charles Ditzel to get organized for a presentation we'll do tomorrow: "12 Reasons to Use NetBeans." Then I stepped into the Hands On Lab to check out the course on the NetBeans Profiler. This is the course I wrote and taught for JavaOne in San Francisco back in June. Since then Ruth Kusterer has helped me to update it and now it has been translated into Japanese. I had told the instructor, Takayuki Okazaki, that I would hang out in the lab in case they ran into any problems. But they didn't - Okazaki-san had things completely under control.

Lab Proctor Keiichi Oono helps out a student.

The instructor on the left, with me on the right.

Since I wasn't needed at the lab, I took the opportunity to go over to the exhibit floor and look for Anatoli Fomenko. Charles Beckham and I are on the hook to do demos tomorrow during Jeff Jackson's keynote and Anatoli was in charge of loading Java Studio Enterprise 8 onto the demo machine. I need NetBeans 5.0 beta and had to load it. I had also saved a project directory that I needed and was disappointed to discover that Solaris seems to have problems reading a CD that was created by Windows. It read the data okay, but the file names got truncated. Chuk Munn Lee confirmed that there is some sort of limitation. If anyone has more details, please leave a comment.

Anyway, I got it worked out and then called it a day. Well, almost a day - I had some time to kill until the official keynote technical rehearsal at 9:00 PM. Where we ran into some technical difficulties.... Proving once again that it is always wise to have a backup plan.

Comments

• Hi, thank you for taking care about the former tools on NetBeans3.6. I really appreciate NB5, so with those good old tools it would be the strongest IDE in the world.

  Posted by: noniko on November 08, 2005 at 06:56 AM

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