Hans Muller's Blog

A Brief Report from JavaOne Japan

This year, JavaOne Japan is during the week of November 7th in a jaw dropping venue called Tokyo International Forum. On Tuesday Scott Violet, Josh Marianacci, and I made two presentations based on Desktop Java talks from the San Francisco JavaOne: Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 1: Lookin' Good, and Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 2: Runnin' Fast.

Sessions at JavaOne Japan are shorter, just 45 minutes, and the presentations are translated into Japanese in real-time. Before each session we met with the translators to go over technical terms and other jargon. The translators work in pairs because the job is a bit of a mental sprint, so they shift the work back and forth. They always advise us to follow two simple rules: speak slowly, pausing between slides to allow them catch up, and don't tell jokes. Not being funny just comes naturally, however it's tough to speak slowly when you're trying to cram 60 minutes of material into a 45 minute session. We tended to start out at a sensible pace and then gradually accelerate to the point where the last slide sounded like it was delivered by Alvin and the Chipmunks. After the first talk we met the translators in the corridor. The culture here is polite and friendly and I think they abhor violence. Still, I was glad that the translators didn't have a club handy.

Here are the important sites and documents we referred to during the talk. The San Francisco versions of both talks are available online at developers.sun.com:

• Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 1: Lookin' Good
• Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 2: Runnin' Fast

Romain Guy developed some of the special effects shown in the "Lookin' Good" presentation and he's been writing about them in his jroller blog as well as his blog on java.net. The code for some of the special effects is available now from the SwingFX project . The animation framework used to animate the button and window backgrounds was written by Chet Haase and is the basis of an open source project at timingframework.dev.java.net

The Mustang splash screen API is documented in this java.sun.com tutorial And you can download an early access build of Mustang from mustang.dev.java.net.

Scott Violet's in-depth article about performance tuning applications with large JTables is available on java.sun.com: Christmas Tree Applications

The SwingWorker API, for moving work from the event dispatching thread to a worker thread, has been extensively documented. The latest documents and downloads can be found at swingworker.dev.java.net

The latest beta release of NetBeans includes support for performance tuning and the new Matisse Swing GUI designer. You can download NetBeans from netbeans.org. Information about configuring the GC, for example to reduce startup time by making the heap big enough, can be also found on the netbeans site: performance.netbeans.org/howto/jvmswitches/

Three other bloggers have covered the Extreme GUI talks at JavaOne Japan: Charles Ditzel: Live From Tokyo: Extreme UI Makeover - A Great Talk on Developing Powerful Desktop Apps and John O'Conner: JavaOne Tokyo '05: Extreme GUI Makeover and Greg Sporar from the NetBeans team: JavaOne Tokyo, Day One. Scott, Josh and I appreciate the coverage and the photos (thanks John)!

Comments

• amazing! i want to get ahold of that im avatar/ichat like ui widgets displayed in joconner's blog (http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joconner/archive/2005/11/javaone_tokyo_0_11.html). that ui soooooooooooo rocks!

  Posted by: gonzo on November 09, 2005 at 07:55 AM

• Looks like I wasn't the only one to cover our presentations.
  I've appended a paragraph links to blogs about the sessions
  from Charles Ditzel, John O'Conner, and Greg Sporar.
  

  Posted by: hansmuller on November 09, 2005 at 03:02 PM

• I'm really interested in both seeing this Extreme GUI demo, and also understanding the methods used to create it. Can you post it as a webstartable demo?

  I understand that it's been a novelty, but haven't you showed it at all the most important places now already, so all of us that could not go to the JavaOne events can see it as well?

  But more importantly than seeing the demo would be to see the source code and methods used to implement it.

  I get the feeling you're beating a little around the bush, with posting a lot of different links with bits and pieces of how this can be done instead of showing a complete example.

  I know it's probably a bit of work to clean the code up and all that, but I would think this is what you are mainly concerned with, helping developers create real applications like the ones you are showing at JavaOne ? :)

  Thanks for the good articles,

  Gath

  Posted by: gath55 on November 10, 2005 at 01:23 AM

• You'll find code for some of the effects we showed in Romain Guy's

  SwingFX project . I should have noted that Romain actually has
  two blogs, the one I mentioned on

  www.jroller.com/page/gfx, and another blog on

  weblogs.java.net/blog/gfx. I'm not quite sure what algorithm he
  uses to decide which blog new material lands in, however you can find
  relevant demos and code in both of them. For example there's a nice
  writeup and a web started demo about the drop shadow code in Romain's
  java.net blog called

  Kickin', rockin', jammin' FX for Swing.
  

  Posted by: hansmuller on November 10, 2005 at 01:41 PM

• It is really great that the talks from the JavaOne conferences are available online! But I think it would be a good idea to have a video too. The problem with the "slide-shows" is that you cannot see the live demos which sometimes makes it hard to grasp what this is all about. E.g. You hear about an old and ugly dialog and a new fancy version but since you cannot see it it is hard to get the point. Greetings, Alex

  Posted by: anubis_1 on November 10, 2005 at 11:45 PM

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