Joshua Marinacci's Blog

No Session-y Goodness for Me.

As many of you have discovered, your submissions to JavaOne were rejected. Don't feel bad. Only one of my 6 proposals were accepted, and I'm now a Sun employee myself. I the competition was fierce. The upside is we should have a really rocking JavaOne conference coming up.

I've finally gotten my HR forms filled out, found a desk, and gotten my citizenship confirmed so that I can get my badge and secure card. More than anything I have to say that Sun takes security seriously. It makes sense, I suppose. We sell software and hardware to help other companies make their own systems secure, so it makes sense to start right at home. The effort is impressive and works quite well.

I have a badge that will let me into buildings and a special card to access the VPN from anywhere. This I will be able to work on my computer in Santa Clara from my home in Atlanta for two months. Pretty cool. On top of this we have an intranet with access to virtually everything: the company address book, my 401k, healthcare, and even bus schedules. I'm quite impressed with how well it all works. They even have those smartcards that pull up your desktop into any computer as soon as you plug it in. I've been through several other companies with horrible systems that never worked well (including a certain wellknown cellphone provider). It's good to see that the technology can work if you do it right, and that security is front and center. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. :)

Okay, so back to work. If you've been following my blog you know that I have just joined the Swing team at Sun. I am replacing another Josh so perhaps no one will notice. :) The team is made up of a lot of good engineers with a lot of great ideas. We had our first big meeting a few days ago and I'm starting to get settled in. Looks like I'll start by fixing lots of bugs as we make our way towards the beta of Mustang. Seems like just yesterday when Tiger came out. I think I'll like having a short release schedule, even if it makes my job harder. The important thing is I can get fixes out to Swing developers faster. And we've got lots of cool stuff coming, so stay tuned.

Comments

• Hi Joshua,

  When did you get the message your session was accepted? I just received the declined messages (still have a session in the hope queue though) and so did my friends (in other words, you're the first lucky one I know that received an accepted notification :-).

  -- Felipe
  

  Posted by: felipeal on March 14, 2005 at 04:34 AM

• Actually, I don't know that it was accepted. I received my 5 rejections at about the same time and didn't get my acceptance, so I assumed it made it in, but maybe not. Perhaps there won't be any acceptance notes until the decisions have been made for all of the tracks, not just Swing.

  Posted by: joshy on March 14, 2005 at 05:56 AM

• "They even have those smartcards that pull up your desktop into any computer as soon as you plug it in. "

  
  Please elaborate with product names, if possible. Any computer? Is this a software version of the Sun Ray?

  Speaking of Sun Rays...

  I'm slowly setting up a network of Sun Rays at home. I have been interested in the technology for some time and used Sun Rays are now quite cheap.

  The server side software is OK, but the implementation technology baffles me. I ran into an undocumented problem with the utadm command. Much to my surprise, the command is thousands of lines of shell script. To be fair, it is well documented shell script.

  Perhaps utadm doesn't really need a friendly GUI (and thus does not need Swing), but it does ship on both Linux and Solaris. If only there was a nice cross-platform language that utadm could have been implemented in--oh, wait. Java needs more use within Sun.

  I would actually argue that utadm does need the option of a friendly GUI. The counter argument is that developing a friendly GUI for such a program is too hard to be worthwhile. If it really is too hard, then the Swing team needs to address the problem. There are lots of application programmers within Sun. If Swing can address their needs then its value will increase. If Swing can't meet Sun's internal needs, what chance does it have of continued success?

  Posted by: coxcu on March 14, 2005 at 07:48 AM

• It would be nice to know what IDE are you using to develop Swing? Is it allowed to use other tools than NetBeans at SUN ? :), e.g. IntelliJ .
  

  Posted by: amohombe3 on March 15, 2005 at 05:19 AM

• To the best of my knowledge the computers they have at Sun are indeed Sun Rays. I haven't used them much since I do my development on a Mac and testing on Windows, but they seem like a nice system. I know that there are a lot of legacy parts to the system (as in all large companies) that are slowly being rewritten as Java Web Start apps using Swing. I can't speak for the corporate strategy (obviously) but Sun seems to have a lot of upcoming projects using Swing and JWS.

  Posted by: joshy on March 15, 2005 at 11:36 AM

• While we are encouraged to "eat our own dogfood" we can use any application we want. I personally have used jEdit for the past 4 years (ever since I dumped Emacs because no one knows Lisp anymore), but I'm going to start trying them all. In particular I want to see how they all support interface development.

  Posted by: joshy on March 15, 2005 at 11:38 AM

• Josh,
  If you want to try them all, than I suggest you to try this one too:
  http://www.jformdesigner.com/
  As a Swing developer, I am convinced wou will appreciate it :). Of course, it's more for application developers, not "Swing Core" developers, but it's very nice too see a cool and productive application.
  

  Posted by: amohombe3 on March 16, 2005 at 02:23 AM

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