Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Rockin' 2007

Well, the new year has come and my vacation is over. I the last three weeks I gave a way a bunch of projects, released the JXMapViewerApplet, I had my entire family fly to Oregon from all over the country, and got married to the beautiful Jennifer Greenup. I even got to stop for some coffee (see photo below). Not bad for a supposed vacation.

So what does 2007 bring? For me personally, a lot less moving. I'm settled in Oregon now (still have to get a new license) which means that I can get back to SwingLabs and cool open source projects.

For the Java world, 2007 is going to be an exciting place. Over the next year the community will begin to explore the possibilities revealed by open sourcing Java. I can't wait to see what happens. I'm also personally involved in several cool projects that we will develop and reveal over the course of this year. Here's just a quick preview of what's coming.

Big changes in Swing Labs. I won't say any more. Instead I'll let Rich take the lead on this.

Finishing up Painters and the JXMapViewer. This are both subprojects in Swing Labs that I have been very passionate about over the last year. As we put the final touches on version 1.0 I hope you will find some interesting things to do with them. I am particularly intrigued with the JXMapViewerApplet. If we can control the applet using Javascript then many interesting hacks become possible.

I proposed several sessions for Java One, including a Birds of a Feather talk on Flying Saucer. This year I've taken a different approach. Rather than discussing how Flying Saucer works I will show how to use it in some real world applications; with PDF generation as the focus.

Top notch support in NetBeans for JSRs 295 and 296, the Beans Binding and Application frameworks. We are homing in on final designs for a suite of new features that will make building client apps a breeze in NetBeans. Look for new builds over the coming months as we approach JavaOne.

A top secret project. There's an idea I've had for a while that will finally come to fruition this year. This project is the reason I have been clearing my plate of other code and projects. I really feel the idea is so good it warrants spending all of my free time on it.

Speaking of clearing my plate, there is one last code drop to give away. Look for it next week.

So lets say goodbye to 2006 and look forward to all of the great things coming in 2007. It's going to be an exciting year!

- Josh

Comments

• Darn glad to have you here in Oregon! =) And I can't wait to see what you have coming down the pipe as well!

  Posted by: olsonje on January 02, 2007 at 01:32 PM

• Josh,
  A key ingredient to making applications a "breeze to make" is to have lots of components that can be manipulated visually as in Visual Basic and Delphi, and I'm not talking about the standard ones but off-the-shelf ones from independent vendors. JSR 295 and 296 are important for this from the end developers point of view but for the bean writers' p-o-w JSR 273 is way more important. The JavaBean spec hasn't been touched in almost 10 years now and it's a pain to code against. For instance it still say that you should make all your beans "java.io.Serializable"... Please give 273 the attention it deserves or the bean writers will IMO not have a chance to have ROI on their beans.

  Cheers,
  Mikael Grev

  Posted by: mgrev on January 02, 2007 at 02:21 PM

• olsonje: thanks. Are you in Oregon as well? Where? I wonder how many Java Oregonians there are. :)

  Posted by: joshy on January 02, 2007 at 08:43 PM

• Mikael: You'll get no disagreement from me. The only question is what's the best way to go about it. Alas I have only enough resources to work on a certain number of things, but improving JavaBeans is definitely on my mind.

  Posted by: joshy on January 02, 2007 at 08:44 PM

• I hereby extend to you my "welcome to Oregon" as well, in addition to congrats to you and Jennifer. As a lifelong Oregon resident, I can guarantee you that you also made the right (geographic) move :-).

  Craig McClanahan
  

  Posted by: craig_mcc on January 02, 2007 at 09:08 PM

• How about Josh.clone() ?

  Posted by: mikaelgrev on January 02, 2007 at 11:34 PM

• > Josh.clone()

  Is that a shallow copy or a deep copy? :-)

  Posted by: rbair on January 03, 2007 at 08:23 AM

• Why is there no .cloneToAppropriateDepth()? It would clone Josh's coding skills but not the need for sleeping and eating...

  Posted by: mikaelgrev on January 03, 2007 at 08:52 AM

• I don't know if I'd get too much coding done without eating and sleeping. Perhaps an alternate implementation of the Josh interface would be more appropriate. :)

  Posted by: joshy on January 03, 2007 at 08:56 AM

• Here in Eugene/Springfield, the main Java employers that I know of are Symantec and Lunar Logic. I am pretty sure that they focus mostly on J2EE stuff.

  I was working at a branch of EDS here that was doing very thick rich client stuff, but virtually the whole development staff was laid off from the Eugene branch back in mid-2002. The reason I am able to be here working with Java is I got a good gig telecommuting for a small company in NYC, building a couple desktop apps.

  And of course you telecommute too, unless there is a branch of Sun here that I have never heard about. :)

  I know of another Oregon developer in Portland that just left the Swing world due to lack of Swing jobs -- http://www.jroller.com/page/nweber/?anchor=moving_on

  David
  

  Posted by: davidbrowne on January 03, 2007 at 01:17 PM

• Hello!

  Still reading this entry?

  First, here's a joke:

  I'm glad to hear you are living in Oregon --- because I am not living there.

  !!

  OK: Now here's something I so happened to notice, related to JavaBeans and thinking about evolvement: If you look at the "DocWeb" project: the documentation for javax.sound.sampled.AudioSystem is nonsensical: the various static methods that begin with "get" are listed as Properties. This is the URL -- oh, wait, this is only the top-level URL since it seems all this AJAX has obliterated the actual location of the "javax.sound.sampled.AudioSystem" resource!:

  http://doc.java.sun.com/DocWeb/

  This is just something I noticed very recently, and put it together from reading this blog entry.

  Anyway, I hope you do see this comment, and I am interested in the evolution of JavaBeans: which I also feel could stand some type of an upgrade.

  Good luck to you.
  Ciao!
  Steven Coco.

  Posted by: steevcoco on January 04, 2007 at 04:50 PM

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