Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Aerith: live from the floor

I'm sitting in the audience watching Tuesday's keynote where Romain Guy and Richard Bair are on stage showing the new Swing demo we built called Aerith. It's a roadtrip slideshow builder that combines Google Maps, Flickr, and Yahoo Geocode to let you make your own slideshow of photos you took on your trip. Once you are doing setting up the slideshow you can share the trip with your friends as an applet.

Aerith really shows off the power of Swing, Java2D, and JOGL when you combine it with webservices and applets. With Desktop Java you can do things you couldn't ever do in AJAX. And most importantly, it looks great!

We will have the code up soon and parts of it will be going into SwingLabs, but you can see the screenshots and join the mailing list today at: aerith.dev.java.net.

Comments

• So where did you get the name? An FF reference maybe? :-)

  Posted by: invalidname on May 16, 2006 at 03:04 PM

• Hey Josh--looks fantastic! I'm looking forward to see which parts of this make it into SwingX/SwingLabs--and hope that Aerith has a better uptake than Joplin did last year. Nice work! Can't wait for the WebStart demo! Cheers, Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on May 17, 2006 at 12:37 AM

• This application is very cool.

  Posted by: tmky2k on May 17, 2006 at 01:24 AM

• Now THIS looks cool. Since Romain Guy joined the swing team the java examples are really eye catchers! Why did this took so long?

  Posted by: plutus78 on May 17, 2006 at 02:16 AM

• Looks awesome! Can't wait to see the code and how it was put together!

  Posted by: wsnyder6 on May 17, 2006 at 06:31 AM

• If there was a smiley face icon that did the whole bowing thing...that should get the point across as to how cool this app is! You guys are geniuses and I cant wait to read the code!!!

  Posted by: suryad on May 17, 2006 at 11:04 AM

• Thanks guys. We worked really hard on it and hope to have code for you soon. There are a few details to work out first. Romain has done a great job of giving us ideas and his unique visual flair has really helped give us some great looking demos. Thanks Romain!

  Stay tune for more cool stuff this summer.

  Posted by: joshy on May 17, 2006 at 01:02 PM

• This look really nice. I'm not sure if you've seen it, but we've got a media management application called SimpleCenter (http://www.simplecenter.com) that is doing quite well and is being distributed with products from Nokia and Philips. And now, we're making SimpleCenter open source - see http://www.simplecenter.org. We've got a pod at JavaONE in the 'Power of Java' section. Perhaps some of this stuff could be integrated into SimpleCenter? Great work! Jon Nichols

  Posted by: sandtiger on May 17, 2006 at 11:02 PM

• Thank you all of for your kinds words. I've just posted a follow up blog with links to the keynote video and the FAQ Romain put together on Aerith. Rest assured there will be code coming soon. We've got to go sleep first! :)

  Posted by: joshy on May 19, 2006 at 09:00 PM

• Josh very smooth. Can't wait to see it in action. Kudos to the gfx designer(s) too.

  Posted by: ca_little on May 20, 2006 at 03:56 AM

• How does Aerith make use of Google maps? My understanding is that a google map is a javascript widget that requires a license key that ties it to a specific public web directory. Is Aerith a desktop app?

  Posted by: rdhyee on May 24, 2006 at 09:42 AM

• Exactly, that's why it's a problem! Essentially I'm bypassing the javascript API which is a no-no. I'm currently trying to work something out with Google. They seem like good guys so I hope we can figure out a way to do it that still respects their copyright. Even if I can't work out something in the near future we will release the map component. It just might not have the Google TileFactory implementation, but other impls could be built for whatever other mapping sources are out there.

  Posted by: joshy on May 24, 2006 at 08:30 PM

• Josh, even if you can't post the Google code, can you tell us how you bypass the javascript API?
  

  Posted by: os2baba on May 27, 2006 at 08:03 AM

• I'm still discussing things with Google so I'd rather not. However you can easily search on the web to find a discussion of how their API works. It's very simple. The tricky parts that we did were for polar coordinate transformations and some sophisticated threading and caching, which is orgthogonal to the map provider and will be open sourced soon.

  Posted by: joshy on May 27, 2006 at 07:42 PM

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