Ben Galbraith's Blog

JavaOne Archives

Ajax and Desktop Conferences

Dion Almaer and I were given the opportunity to deliver a talk on Ajax at JavaOne earlier this year. The session went pretty well, and I found myself giving a repeat on the last day of JavaOne that also went pretty well. Many thanks to those of you that attended and especially to those of you that gave us feedback both in person after the talks or via the eval forms.

One of the things a lot of you told us was that you wished we went into greater depth in some area of Ajax. Indeed, in a 60 minute session, we had to leave a lot unsaid.

I'm happy to say that for those of you that were left a little wanting, the Ajax firehouse is wide open: Dion and I are hosting a conference in Boston next month (www.theajaxexperience.com) where sixty 90-minute sessions will be delivered over the course of three days. We've got a ton of Java-specific content, including the lead of Google's Java-based GWT framework, the lead of the excellent DWR framework, and one of the core Spring developers.

Desktop Conference

A while back, I solicited feedback here on the possibility of giving a Desktop Developer's Conference. I'm happy to say that I'm moving forward with this concept. At first, I was going to make it a Java, .NET, and Cocoa/ObjC affair, but as I evaluated the marketplace, I decided to give it a Java focus. I've seen a few .NET conferences start and then abruptly stop, and I've seen no precedent for a Cocoa conference, so I got cold feet building out a lot of content for those technologies.

But, I still am planning on having Microsoft show up and talk to us about both WinForms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). And, I'm still planning on having Apple show up to talk about Cocoa. Nothing like seeing how the other half (1/3?) lives.

I would like some more feedback on a few things:

1. How much (if any) SWT/Eclipse content should there be? Anyone have any strong feelings one way or the other? It's hard for me to get a good read on this -- not a lot of hard data and my own experience suggests that SWT/JFace/EclipseRCP usage is a small fraction of Swing, but I could be off-base here.

2. Should this be a multi-track event or a one-track event? If multi-track, should it be a large track event like The Ajax Experience with six tracks, should it be mini-track with 2-3, or mega-track like JavaOne with 10 tracks+ (like I could find that much desktop content)?

Thanks,

Ben

Curse You, Duke!

One of the things I enjoy about fatherhood is being, for however brief a period, somewhat of an authority on life. Well, thanks to Duke, the appearance of parental infallibility has come to an early end.

Ever since JavaOne 2006 (where I got this nice green shirt), I've had to deal with all kinds of questions from my four and two year old daughters:

Girls: "Daddy, what's that on your shirt?"

Me: "Err, that's Duke."

Girls: "What is he?"

Me: "Hmm."

Girls: "Is he a bird? I think he's a bird."

Me: "No, he's not a bird. He's, uh, a cartoon character."

Girls: "He looks like a bird."

Me: "No, he's a cartoon mascot for Java."

And now, every time I wear it, I have to deal with a variant of this conversation. Like this morning:

Girls: "Is that Duke? What is he?"

And so forth. I'm just waiting for one of them to say, "Well, what exactly do you know, daddy?" and to hear them whispering amongst themselves: "Don't bother asking daddy that, he doesn't even know what Duke is."

Why can't Java have a recognizable noun as a mascot? Like a bird? Or even a horse? Here's for Mustang shirts at next JavaOne. Actually, too bad we can't go back and have Merlin shirts made. That could have been really cool...

Lazarus, Ajax, and San Francisco

And so, after months of dormancy, I resurrect this blog (and my personal blog, "Married... with children", too -- this entry is cross-posted there.)

Why did it die?

Pragmatic Ajax. I can assure you, all of us involved in authoring that little piece of sh^H^H, err, high-quality-Ajax-reference-material-available-soon-at-a-bookstore-near-you (did I just make a ^H joke?) have made blood oaths to talk each other out of authoring another book. Ever.

Why am I reviving it?

Shamless self-promotion, my friends. What's a blog if not self-serving? I want to tell you about The Ajax Experience, the upcoming conference that we Ajaxians over at Ajaxian.com are putting on in a few months.

I'm amazed at the speaker line-up that we were able to put together, from the compulsory keynote by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path to the founders/maintainers of such key frameworks as Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and more. Other big names, such as Zimbra CTO Scott Dietzen and Adobe/Macromedia Software Architect Kevin Lynch, willl there. This will be a technical event full of incredible content.

I also want to mention that we've got some interesting ideas for making the conference experience distinct and enjoyable. My fellow Ajaxian Dion Almaer and I attend way too many shows each year, and believe me, we're as excited as anyone at making The Ajax Experience unique and entertaining. I don't want to spoil too many of the surprises, but I will say that we'll be giving away a MacBook Pro (whatever is the latest and fastest model, fully loaded) at the show -- and that's not the giveaway that I think will generate the most buzz. (Hint, hint.)

The show takes place in San Francisco from the night of Wednesday May 10 to the night of Friday May 12. As you may notice, that's right before JavaOne, which takes place the following week. Since we're holding the show four blocks away from JavaOne's venue at the Moscone Center, in the lovely Westin St. Francis hotel, we hope a lot of folks travelling to JavaOne from out of town can simply adjust their travel plans to fly in and check in to their hotel a few days early and attend The Ajax Experience as well. How convenient! ;-)

I hope you can make it.

It's great to be alive and blogging again (without having to rename this blog "Separated... with children" as a certain third-party may have threatened -- ah, the many rewards of moonlight book authoring). I can't promise that future entries won't be self-serving, but I can promise: no more ^H jokes.

Embarassing Moments at JavaOne (and OSCON)

(Cross-posted on Married... with children)

There are two experiences in my life that caused me such embarassment that though years have passed, when I reflect back upon them for more than a few seconds, I find myself subconciously curling up into the fetal position with a pained expression burned into my face.

These are not those experiences. But, they are experiences that were embarassing at the time.

Now that JavaOne is half-way upon us, I couldn't help but think back to an experience at both JavaOne 2003 and JavaOne 2004.

At the JavaOne 2003 show, I attended a Birds-of-Feather (BoF) session given by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, one of Sun's XML wizards. He was talking about his interesting JARV project, which incidentally was a strong inspiration for the new Validation framework in JAXP 1.3 (the JAXP bundled with Java 5). As the time to start his talk drew near, it became apparent that something was wrong. He was tinkering with his notebook in desperation, and soon that heart-dropping expression crossed his face that we all innately recognize -- and it was clear that his notebook just wouldn't boot. It was some PC notebook running some Linux install. Now, you have to understand, I've sat through a lot of presentations in my life. Mostly, they're accompanied by a Windows laptop running PowerPoint, and it always inevitably runs without problem. But, on the rare occasion that a presenter brings a Linux laptop, in my experience the speaker inevitably has problems getting the presentation to work. Nearly without exception.

So when this happened to Kohsuke, I found myself thinking, almost a little smugly, "This would never happen to me."

Kohsuke saved the day by whiteboarding his presentation live in front of all of us. And, it went pretty well! At least, I learned a lot about JARV and wound up using it quite a bit thanks to the excellent presentation. Great job, Kohsuke, on both the talk and the software.

Fast-forward to JavaOne 2004. I'm presenting a BoF in the same hotel just a few rooms away from Kohsuke's presentation. It's a multimedia presentation explaining how the GlooLabs Java-powered WiFi MP3 player works. I've got a great PowerPoint presentation, some multimedia demos, and live code examples all queued up.

And, just before the time to start, I take the AC adapter, already plugging into my trusty Windows laptop (IBM ThinkPad), and plug it into the hotel's cheap, dingy little power strip. And, you guessed it, bye-bye laptop. The LCD instantly turned off. I didn't panic, I just rebooted. I can't tell you how relieved I was as everything came up normally. The blood flowed back into my extremities and... the video died after about two minutes. And it died again after I rebooted. And again. In fact, I was able to reproduce that behavior for the rest of the laptop's (short) life. Plugging in an external monitor (e.g., the LCD projector) made no difference. The video card, my friends, was fried.

Ahhh, life's little ironies. I followed Kohsuke's example and whiteboarded my talk to a crowd of folks who came expecting to see the MP3 player in action. Folks were complimentary, but I felt really, really stupid. The happy coda to the story is that right after my talk, I crossed the street (both figuratively and literally) and bought my replacement notebook* at the Apple Store and have enjoyed being a serf in Steve's little Cult of Mac ever since.

While I'm talking about embarassing conference moments, I have to throw in one I had at OSCON 2004. I presented there too, though I don't think I did anything embarassing while delivering my talk. No, the moment came for me when I listened to Jim Hugunin talk about IronPython. So, I admit, at this point in my life, hating Microsoft was a personal hobby. And if there's any group that despises Microsoft more than the Scott McNealy of this era, it was the Open Source crowd.

So when Jim announced in his talk that he had accepted a job at Microsoft, I shouted out a playful "Boo!", expecting others to snicker or join in. Instead, everyone in the section of the room I was in turned around and stared at me, all effectively communicating, "What kind of moronic freak are you?" I sat pretty silent for the rest of the talk.

You know, while I'm at it, I have a near miss from JavaOne 2005 I'd like to share. I delivered two talks at that show; my "almost-embarassing-moment" comes from the Ajax BoF that Dion Almaer and I gave together. Our talk submission completely pre-dated the Ajax phenomenom -- we submitted it even before Google Maps came out, but just after folks were starting to notice XMLHttpRequest.

Of course, in the months that followed after the talk was submitted, the Ajax movement caught on and was incredibly popular around the time we presented at JavaOne. In the meantime, Dion and I had started Ajaxian.com, and we spent a lot of energy tracking the Ajax evolution. When it came time for our JavaOne talk, we treated the talk as an opportunity to teach folks about Ajax, and didn't pay much attention to the BoF abstract we submitted (with BoFs, you bring your own slide deck and do your own thing).

As it turned out, Dion and I had a few hours of spare time before we gave the talk. So we thought we'd have some fun. The first thing we did was code up a Google Maps engine from scratch. For months we'd been telling people it was easy and that they could do it in a few hours; we thought it was high time we walked the walk. And, as it turned out, we finished it in a couple of hours**. In the thirty minutes before the BoF started, as we were relaxing with Howard Lewis Ship, we thought, "Hey, why don't we add off-line capabilities to that Ajax RSS Reader we made?" So, about two minutes before the BoF started, we finished the off-line mode feature, which lets you download feeds by consuming Blogline's Web Services API and save the results of the feed to disk (yes, using JavaScript) so that even if you clear the cache and quit the browser, you can relaunch the browser and read your feeds, even if you're off-line.

The near-miss embarassing moment came when, as we presented the talk, more than a few people asked, "When are we going to see the off-line mode?" That caught us completely by surprise, because to us, we were talking about Ajax, but, of course, in the abstract, that particular aspect of the presentation was given prominent mention. We were happy to demo the off-line mode that we had just barely finished coding, but man, that would have really looked bad if we had said, "Err, yeah, no off-line mode, but what do you think of this neat Ajax effect?"

Ahh, memories. I wonder what JavaOne 2006 will hold in store?

* The change of term from "laptop" to "notebook" here is more than stylistic. Those PowerBooks run HOT! In fact, if you read the manual, Apple clearly states that -- get this -- it's not designed to be used for extended periods of time ON YOUR LAP. Which is why, if you study their materials, you will never, ever see Apple refer to their PowerBook notebooks as "laptops." They're not.

** If you're interested, our upcoming Pragmatic Ajax book has the code from that experience, demonstrating how you too can build your own Google Maps style UI.

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