Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Big news. I'm going West.

Hello All. I know it's been a while since I've been posted, so I'd like to let you all know what I've been working on. Lots of good things have happened or are coming soon. First of all....

I'm going to work for Sun

I have given my two weeks notice at my current company. Starting March 7th I will officially be a member of the core Swing team at Sun. I would like to thank Jeff Dinkins and all of the great engineers on the Swing team for letting me join their group. Special thanks to Scott Violet and Chet Haase for putting me through the wringer, seeing me fail miserably, and then giving me a job anyway. :)

Working on Swing is going to be a big opportunity for me and a big challenge, but I'm excited to be working on something that I consider to be so important. I personally feel that Rich Client Applications (which I loosely define as high quality desktop apps that interact with the network) are going to be the growth area for software development. It's the next big thing and I want to make sure that Swing is front and center.

I will initially be doing a lot of bug fixing (yay) so no longer can be content to I just complain. Now I'll have to pony up and actually fix things. :) I have a lot of interesting ideas for new projects that I'll be sharing over the coming months. Many of them will hopefully take the form of new open source projects like JDIC and JDNC (and maybe even a JSR or two) so I hope you'll all join me in building some really cool technology.

Oh, and I can't promise anything yet, but I'm going to do my best to get us some non-rectangular windows. (can't let IBM have all the fun!)

Second: I'm co-writing Swing Hacks

For the last few months Chris Adamson and I have been working on a new book for O'Reilly called Swing Hacks. It will contain a hundred different cool things you can do with Swing, ranging from sortable JTables to drop-shadow menus. Some of these are snippets of code we have found useful in our own projects, while others are just plain fun. My personal favorite is the animated transitions for tabbed panes. We don't have a firm press date yet but we are expecting it to hit the shelves sometime this summer. We might even get to sign a few copies.

Finally: Flying Saucer R5 is coming

A new release of Flying Saucer, the all Java XHTML renderer, is coming. The current CVS builds are very good and we're going to focus on stomping out bugs and get a new solid version out before April. This is going to be the big release. Flying Saucer is finally stable and fast enough to use in real projects, and once it ships I've got some really cool apps on the drawing board coming next.

So that's it. I don't want you to think I've been abandoning you all. On the contrary I love desktop Java and have been working furiously to get to do this stuff full time.

So, in summary, cool stuff coming and send in your bugs

Cheers,
   Josh

Comments

• Congratulations Josh!

  What excellent news!

  This sounds like an assignment perfectly suited to both your interests, and your abilities. It's also nice to finally hear some good employment news coming out of Sun for a change. If this keeps up, I just might have to go get myself some more SUNW stock!

  I'm with you about RCA; I think it is the next big thing!

  Best wishes, have fun. :-)

  John

  Posted by: cajo on February 23, 2005 at 02:13 PM

• All the luck to you!

  We're counting on you to splatter those old hardened bugs, or at least enable the bug fixes conditionally for newer projects.

  Cheers,
  Mikael Grev

  Posted by: mgrev on February 23, 2005 at 04:36 PM

• Hi Josh,

  Best of luck .

  I really hope that senior people like you, can push SUN into developing a comprehensive Rich Clients Platform.

  SUN, in my humble opinion, already owns the entire tech stack to develop such an RCP, complete with a GUI Toolkit, a communications API and server side support.

  You could even launch a JSR to standardise Eclipse RCP, Thinlets, Lazlo, Google RCP:)

  http://navycut.blogspot.com

  http://storekeeper.dev.java.net
  

  Posted by: swapnonil on February 23, 2005 at 10:01 PM

• 
  I personally feel that Rich Client Applications (which I loosely define as high quality desktop apps that interact with the network) are going to be the growth area for software development.

  Back in the day, we called those "client-server" apps, and I certainly hope you're correct that they're poised for a comeback. I've spent most of the last five years writing browser based apps that, in many cases, were for internal use only and could have been done as GUI apps with much less effort. Creating complex UIs in HTML is a hassle, even with all of the frameworks and tag libraries out there, and even the best ones will not give a user the same level of interactiveness and responsiveness that a GUI is capable of.
  

  Posted by: dglasser on February 24, 2005 at 05:52 AM

• I like to think even bigger: How about client-servers applications?

  There each component in a window could be served by a different machine; virtual or physical. It would be both modular, and scalable, even dynamically!

  I do feel your pain though Dave. Trying to make a UI out of HTML sounds about as fulfilling as making a static text page, out of an applet.

  Posted by: cajo on February 24, 2005 at 07:40 AM

• Josh,

  This is very kewl! I, like you feel that network capable desktop apps are the future. I am reading/seeing more and more desktop apps that provide interactive features you are hard pressed to find in web apps, but can communicate via http/web services so they get the same benefit as a web browser based app.

  I also believe Swing has a much larger developer base than SWT right now, but that seems to be diminishing due to SWT's rapid development cycle. New versions of SWT come out much faster than Swing due to the 2 year release cycle of JDKs now. It's really too bad. :(

  What I and many others really wish would happen is a new swing implementation would show up. Yes, it would break compatibility, but so what. SWT does too if you think about moving to it.. you have to rewrite. Frankly, AWT/Swing were a great first try. Now lets rewrite a new GUI toolkit from the ground up with no ties to AWT or Swing, although the API's could be similar and even the same in some areas. There is a lot to like about Swing and also SWT. If there is no chance IBM/Sun can work together on a "combined" GUI toolkit, either let Sun join IBM and extend the heck out of SWT quickly, or lets get a new toolkit in place in the next JDK 1.6 release!!

  But alas, that wont happen I am quite sure. :(

  Anyway, I am working on my own pluggable swing application framework. www.platonos.org. It's far from ready, but the plugin engine is nearly done and I am slowly adding to the application framework. The goal is to give something like Eclipse RCP and NetBeans with a plugin engine very similar to Eclipse's all while being very well tested. My day job has me doing Swing automation coding, I've written a test harness that you can graphcially build automation tests from reusable coded and soon recorded "parts" and execute them inline with the application or as a nightly build, hopefully going to open source a new pluggable version of it sooner than later.

  So hopefully my framework will be a boost to Swing developers in the near future.
  

  Posted by: buckman1 on February 24, 2005 at 12:28 PM

• Josh,

  Hey don't forget to comment that code I asked you about...

  Just kidding best of luck!

  Posted by: skydive971 on February 24, 2005 at 03:04 PM

• Thank you all for your kind words of encouragement. I

  Posted by: joshy on February 24, 2005 at 08:36 PM

• Great news for Sun and the Swing faithful. Sun has it's priorities right for Mustang.
  

  Posted by: rabbe on February 25, 2005 at 05:34 AM

• Josh: Congrats on your new position at Sun in sunny Santa Clara. There are a lot of great engineers at Sun and I'm sure you will have a great time. It's a very engaging place to work.

  I'm really impressed with the level of talent that Sun has been attracting for Swing. This definitely bodes well for the future of rich client applications using Java/Swing.

  Good luck and I'm looking forward to your contributions!

  --Mark

  Posted by: davidson1 on February 25, 2005 at 11:31 AM

• Great news Josh!!! Congrats. Hope you have a great time working with the wonedrful engineers in the swing team.And you'll surely find sun a great place to be.It is THE technology company for any java developer/Architect.And it would be great if you could push for an RCP built on the swing stack. Long live Swing!!!
  "You could even launch a JSR to standardise Eclipse RCP". I honestly hope such a thing never ever happenns. SWT & the accompanying RVP are making a mockery of crossplatformness by delegating just about everything to the native windowing toolkit. You need NOT resort to so much native code to get a professional LaF. You can still paint your own windows,be truly crossplatform, and have great performance. Compare netbeans to eclipse. The latter is a behemoth that takes eons to startup and hogs memory. So much for the "nativity" of SWT. SWT has remained out of the standard distribution and deserves to be just that-an outcast. Naive desktop app developers, who don't need much control over the rendering and are intimidated by the (power and) complexity of swing can continue written cute little apps like they do with VB. The serious ones who write power-apps will continue using swing. Don't accord so much importance to SWT. We can do well without it.
  

  Posted by: bharathch on February 27, 2005 at 10:26 PM

• Bah. Josh, you suck. ;) Just kidding --- Josh and I are (almost) former co-workers. We'll miss you, but at least I'll have a free room next time I'm in San Fran. Good luck.

  Posted by: ca_little on February 28, 2005 at 08:18 PM

• Congrats, Josh

  BTW, I found many xul framework at xul.sourceforge.net , but JDNC is not listed there.

  And here is
  Spring-rcp

  But I think too many choices is not always a good thing, hope swing will be simpler.

  Posted by: liudey on March 26, 2005 at 08:37 PM

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