Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Java One, Future Projects, and Back to Work

So you have probably wondered where I've been. Possibly even missed me. Or maybe you haven't and are glad I haven't wasted any of your precious packets during the last month. In either case: I'm back with lots of interesting things on the way. I've been on vacation, traveling, spending time with family, and then back on the job working on Aerith and getting Mustang ready for Vista. So let's dive in to the good stuff:

JavaOne

I haven't blogged since JavaOne, and even then I didn't blog much. Not like the year before. That's because I consciously chose not to blog. We had a lot of great java.net bloggers this year covering the conference, and they had more time than I did, so I decided to let them do it. I particularly enjoyed my friend Cooper's coverage of the EE stuff. I spent most of my time working at the booth, doing prep for the Aerith demo, and actually attending sessions for a change (I only made it to one last year).

I won't try to recap everything I saw, but I will mention the following highlights:

• The JavaPosse BoF: lots of fun. I had no idea they were so popular. Plus we got a shout out as the Applet of the Week.
• The Sun Spot Hands On Lab. Cute devices with an SDK. Even though the libraries and APIs are completely different I am amazed at how much existing knowledge transfers over. Device programming in Java is much, much easier than working in C.
• The Apple BoF: we got Aerith running on OSX, they committed SWT support, and they announced a recent mustang build for PPC. What more could you want in 50 minutes?!
• Shannon's Drag and Drop talk: I'm amazed at how many people asked great questions and have genuinely novel uses for the DnD apis and the new Mustang additions.

We had lots of people come by the Swing Labs booth and the response to Aerith was great. (more on that below). So overall I think it was a very productive and well attended JavaOne. Of course now I have to figure out what we are going to do next year? What would you think of a session on using Java EE Persistence in client apps?

Aerith

As I said, Aerith was very well received and it has always been our hope to release the code. We now have approval to do so, but haven't been able to work out all of the details with Google yet, so the initial version will have a dummy TileFactory that produces empty tiles. The first thing we'd like to get the community to work on is an implementation that uses NASA's satellite data. More on that when we release the code, which will be very soon, I promise.

Mustang and the Windows Look and Feel

I have a slew of fixes for the Windows Look and Feel (my *actual* job, though that's not what I usually blog about) that will go into Mustang builds over the next month. I'll more on that next week, but for now I will say that our native fidelity is much improved and all of the most egregious bugs have been fixed. Plus there's a surprise coming, but more on that later.

So that's it for today. I'll be back next week with more information on Aerith and the Windows Look and Feel.

Comments

• Looking forward to both your fixes in Mustang and to the Aerith code being finally released.

  Posted by: suryad on June 23, 2006 at 12:08 AM

• So, these are good news about Aerith - I'm really looking forward to integrate some stuff in my apps. Will you also release the code which interfaces with Flickr?

  PS I think many people already asked for this, but I didn't find anything in blogs: where does the 'aerith' name come from? Searching with Google I see that there are multiple possible sources....

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on June 23, 2006 at 05:25 AM

• I've read that you guys are making OS calls to determine the proper look of native components, can you tell us how that works? Also, I've heard that Swing doesn't integrate well with Vista's transparent windows, but SWT apparently works fine because its more native. Is mustang going to include fixes for that?

  Posted by: heaththegreat on June 23, 2006 at 07:01 AM

• fabriziogiudici: We don't know where the name comes from. I picked it, that's for sure. It's just a word I remembered and kinda liked so I started using it as the project name. From what I've heard, it must come from the Finaly Fantasy VII game which I used to play a lot with a friend of mine. Anyway, the code that talks to Flickr is in fact an open source library we found on flickr.com.

  Posted by: gfx on June 23, 2006 at 08:41 AM

• According to Wikipedia Aerith Gainsborough (エアリス・ゲインズブール, Earisu Geinzubūru?, known as "Aeris Gainsborough" in the English version of Final Fantasy VII), is a fictional character from the role playing game Final Fantasy VII . .

  Posted by: joshy on June 23, 2006 at 10:27 AM

• "egregious"! I had to look that one up!

  Looking forward to the suprise... such a tease!

  Posted by: benloud on June 23, 2006 at 09:03 PM

• There are several Vista specific issues that we are fixing, bug they have nothing to do with transparent windows. Vista uses a compositing window manger, much like Mac OS X, which means that each program draws it's window into a buffer and then the OS draws that to the screen. I'm excited about this because it enables lots of cool effects and this is clearly the direction the world is going. However, this entire process is transparent (as it were) to the running application. Java apps will be treated just like any other and should look just fine. Right now I believe we look better than SWT for most things. I'll have more details next week.

  Posted by: joshy on June 25, 2006 at 08:29 AM

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