Joshua Marinacci's Blog

JavaOne Archives

JavaOne: Another One is Done

It's Friday morning and I'm watching the James Gosling keynote from the bean bags in front of the big screen. I'd say this was the most exciting JavaOne I've ever been too. We really saw desktop Java in full force. Perhaps we shouldn't call it desktop anymore, since a form of Java SE is going to be available on phones and other non-desktop computers. So really this was the JavaOne for client Java. Since I've spent most of my professional career pushing the limits of desktop Java I'm very excited about the possibilities of doing cool things on phones and TVs.

So that's the overview. I'll leave it up to the many great bloggers here to give you their take on JavaOne and all of the sessions. I'll give you a quick at what I did before I drive home and sleep for the next few weeks.

Swing Application Framework: JSR 296

The biggest surprise for me in our Swing App Framework session was the incredible attendance. Our room held 500+ people and it was completely full. People were milling around in the back looking for seats. This tells me that quality Swing applications really are important to a lot of people.

The talk went pretty well. Everyone laughed at our bad jokes and the live Flickr demo was a big hit. It's always fun to type in random words on stage and see what bubbles up out of Flickr. We will have the code for the demo as well as screencasts in a place where you can download them soon.

AB5k / Glossitope BoF

So we had a few glitches with our website, including having to completely rebuild the site yesterday morning. Since we think a lot of people have trouble registering on the website we have decided to have another contest soon, giving everyone an opportunity to compete. More details coming soon.

The session went well, I think. We have 35 people, which is pretty good considering we were in at 10PM on the last day of the conference, opposite the After Dark party with free beer and battle bots. We had a few glitches with the projector and audio but overall we were well received. Everyone loved the comic book jokes on the slides as well as our unique brand of humor. I'll have a link to presentation soon. In the mean time you can see our video here.

Your Moment of Zen

And speaking of our video. It was shown on the big board here in front of the bean bag chairs. How cool is that?!

Until next time, keep on Swingin'.

JSR 296 Session Success

Another quick update. Hans and I did our session on JSR 296 today and it was a huge success. We were completely packed, over 500 people I think!

More coming soon.

update

Here is John's coverage of our session. Thanks John.

NetBeans day success

Hey guys. Real quick. I just thought you'd like that we (the NetBeans GUI Builder team) showed Open Street Maps on stage at CommunityOne in front of about >400 people. We did a demo where we built a database application live on stage that combines famous sites in London with photos from WikiPedia and the JXMapKit running Open Street Maps. And we did the whole thing with only a single line of actual code. Everything else was visually assembled in less that 5 minutes. I told the audience that we were using OSM which is "literally created by guys on bikes with GPS trackers. It's amazing". Everyone was very impressed. We'll have screencasts up once we finish JavaOne.

More updates will come as the week continues. We've got our JSR 296 talk and then the launch of some cool stuff for AB5k.

Too busy to blog

I've been too busy to blog for the past couple of weeks. Sadly this will continue for two more weeks until JavaOne begins. Don't worry, though. It's all in a good cause as you will see some great things shortly. In the meantime I leave you with a quick comic that actually made me laugh out loud.

Back from the demo

It was completely exhausting but it went quite well. Just to catch you up, last week I drove nine hours down to Santa Clara, CA to spend three days working on my demo then show it to the demo people. Here's how it works:

Every year we all rush around trying to make the coolest demo ever, hoping to get into the coveted few demo slots for JavaOne keynotes. We show the demo to the team of people who decides these things, including James Gosling, then the best of the bunch are chosen to make it into one of the keynotes.

Two years ago we (the SwingLabs team) built Joplin, an MP3 player app with effects and realtime music visualization. Last year we made Aerith, the 3D Flickr/ Google Maps mashup. Not only was it a super cool demonstration of Java but most of the technology has since migrated into other SwingLabs technologies like the JXMapViewer, SwingX Painters, and Timing Framework.

This year I'm submitting AB5k as my demo. The competition is fierce and having seen what Jasper and Rich cooked up for SwingLabs and what Ken is working on for JOGL I can say that no matter which demos get in you'll be very impressed.

After showing AB5k to anyone who would listen, getting some great feedback from some Swing and Java2D guys, and implementing a slew of new features and eyecandy; I gave the demo Wednesday afternoon. I think it went pretty well. I got a lot of questions, even though my slot was at 4PM and the review team was probably quite tired (one demo every 15 min since 9AM == a lot of demos). Also, James gave me a thumbs up so that's always a good sign.

I won't know for a while if we are in the keynote but in any case it was a lot of fun and greatly improved AB5k itself. Even if we don't get into a keynote you'll all get to see what I've been working on at the AB5k Birds of a Feather session and in videos that I will post online.

Okay, back to work on bugs and getting NetBeans ready for M9. Thanks everyone.

update

We announced AB5k in a Java Posse Roundup session a month ago in Colorado. The audio from that session is now available for download here.

Exhausted

We're #2

I promise I won't shill too much, but Chris just told me that our book was the number 2 seller yesterday according to the list posted by the book store! To our readers we send a heartfelt thanks!

- Josh

Getting ready for JavaOne: The Day of the Desktop

Well. Here I am getting ready for my first real JavaOne. Actually, I attended back in 1999 and had the rare fortune to see Douglas Adams speak, but this is the first time I will be speaking as an author and attending as a Sun employee. It's going to be exciting. And since most Java developers can't attend JavaOne (where would they all sit?) I expect these Java.net blogs to light up like a Christmas tree during the next week. There's going to be all sorts of cool stuff going on, but don't just pay attention to the highlights. Some of the best things will be in the BoFs, smaller sessions, and especially the simple person to person talks over a good beer. (This is what we called P2P in the old days before they invented music, computers, and light.)

I'm personally excited about this JavaOne because I feel like my passion, Java on the Desktop, is finally coming into it's own. Somehow the twin worlds of desktop and web software are colliding right at the time Java's desktop features and performance are getting really, really good. I don't know what it all means (perhaps next week will shed some light on the subject), but it can only mean good things for desktop Java developers.

I'm going to be at the conference all week, so if you see me be sure to say hi. My big presentation on Swing Hacks with Chris will be Wednesday at 4:00 in Hall E, rm. 135. The rest of the time I'm likely to be in the JDIC or JDNC/SwingLabs booth answering questions, showing off our new demos, and getting ideas. I will be posting from my iBook throughout the week as often as I can, plus taking notes for the future. If you have any questions, ideas, or just want to chat, then please drop by. We'll be waiting!

- Josh

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