Janice J. Heiss's Blog

August 2006 Archives

Meet the Engineer QA on java.sun.com

Please check out my latest "Meet the Engineer" Q&A, Meet Tom Ball, Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems with java.net blogger, Tom Ball, who works on Java language tools.

Tom goes way back: he joined the JDK team when the Java language was still called "Oak," created the first debugger API, and helped with the AWT for the 1.0 release.

He currently works on the Jackpot Project, a technology used for searching Java source code and safely and correctly transforming patterns in code, while writing minimal changes back to source. Jackpot’s "engine" is fully accessible, so it’s easy to write your own queries and refactorings.

His tip for writing code: "Write boring code whenever possible. Code that is so obvious it doesn't need comments and which other developers who thrive on cleverness will ignore and dismiss. Write code that only does one thing, but does it really well, so you can write it and forget about it while it quietly works in the background."

Is there anyone who "thrives on cleverness" who's ready to "dismiss" this idea? Is the best code, code that works quietly in the background or is it "clever" code that grabs your attention? Or is this the wrong way of approaching the topic? Any takers?

Meet Josh Marinacci of the Swing Toolkit Team at Sun Microsystems

Please check out the front page of java.sun.com for a
"Meet the Engineer" Q&A, Meet Josh Marinacci of the Swing Toolkit Team at Sun Microsystems, I did with java.net blogger, Josh Marinacci.

Josh has made news recently with the publication of O'Reilly's Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs
which he co-authored with Chris Adamson. In the interview, he gives some of his favorite hacks
for Swing such as the Glass Pane component that sits on top application components and was used to
build many of the hacks in his book. He likens it to "a sheet of glass stretched across the top of your JFrames". It's his favorite tool for building cool hacks.

The core of this hack is the paintComponent() method of the component he installed as the glass pane with frame.setGlassPane(myMagComponent) which we've included in the article. (I wanted to include it here but I can't get the code to display correctly so next time folks, and my apologies.)

Check out the interview for more details and of course let me know what you think.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.