Qusay H. Mahmoud's Blog

Qusay H. Mahmoud is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Guelph in Canada. He has presented technical tutorials at international conferences worldwide. He has published two Java books: Distributed Programming with Java (Manning Publications), and Learning Wireless Java (O'Reilly) that have been translated into Korean, Czech, and Simplified Chinese. Qusay holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Middlesex University in England.

Hybrid Apps with JavaFX

I have attended the General Session this morning. Several applications were demoed showing the power of JavaFX. The most interesting for me was "Connected Life", which interacts with several social networking tools, but what I found most interesting about it is the ability to drag the running application from inside the browser onto the desktop, the browser can then be closed and the application continues to run on the desktop. The 3D graphics look amazing, and the same application run on mobile devices (they even have it running on the Android emulator)...

Enabling developers to write hybrid applications is a great productivity strategy for JavaFX Technology. I cannot wait to see the full SDK for JavaFX sometime over the summer. Q.

Excitement in the Air for the CommunityOne Fair

I am excited to be at JavaOne again this year, and I’ll be watching for interesting stuff around Java ME and Web Services. I arrived in San Francisco around noon and attended some of the afternoon sessions of CommunityOne – this year’s event is much bigger than the previous year and included many more concurrent sessions. Everyone seemed excited about this free and open developer event.

I missed the morning presentation (sorry Roger) on Java ME and the Mobile & Embedded Community projects. But it is unfortunate that this was the only Java ME presentation in the whole CommunityOne event. It is great to see that Java ME powers 8 out of 10 mobile devices, but as the mobile apps market becomes more competitive (hint: Android) Sun needs to do more to keep Java ME at its current level. While there are many interesting Java ME presentations part of JavaOne, CommunityOne is the free event and I think there should have been a full track on Java ME just like there were full tracks on OpenSolaris, GlassFish, Web Apps, and others.

I attended the JUGs (Java User Groups) session “Think Globally, Act Locally”. This is an interesting session and it is great to see everyone’s enthusiasm for this. There were JUG leaders from several groups in the US and Europe. It would have been nice to have more representatives from all over the world (e.g. Middle East) to get a better idea of what other JUGs are doing and what initiatives they have to recruit more members…but may be next year.

Overall, I have enjoyed the CommunityOne event which was concluded with a GREAT reception. Q.

Faculty Summit on Mobile Devices in CS Education

The Centre for Mobile Education Research (Univ. of Guelph) and Research In Motion Limited (RIM) are pleased to announce the first Faculty Summit on Mobile Devices in Computer Science (CS) Education.

This event is for faculty members interested in integrating mobile devices into their courses and across the CS curriculum. The summit will provide a unique opportunity for CS educators at the college and university levels to learn about the potentials of integrating mobile devices in CS education. Attendees will enjoy a day of talks, tutorials, and demos from faculty members, industry speakers and students.

This event will be held at the University of Guelph on Thursday, June 12. More information ia available here: http://cmer.cis.uoguelph.ca/facultysummit. Q.

Workshop on Mobile App Development at SIGCSE

I have just returned from ACM SIGCSE (the 39th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education) which was held in Portland, Oregon. Portland is a nice city, I especially liked the Light Rail and the fact that Oregon has no sales tax (what you see is what you pay).

I have attended the Greenfoot Day at SIGCSE and presented a scenario (Going to the Moon) that can be used to introduce students to programming with Java. It is an entertaining idea developed as part of a final year project by Randy Gallant at the University of Guelph-Humber. Several people from universities, colleges, and high schools are interested in the scenario and we'll be releasing it soon (watch this space).

I have also delivered a tutorial on "Introducing and Teaching Mobile Application Development" which was attended by 17 participants from universities and colleges (mostly from USA and Canada). I mainly covered Java ME and the BlackBerry wireless device, and talked about my experience in integrating BlackBerry devices into my programming courses. The workshop went well and everyone seemed excited about the technology and integrating it into their own courses. Electronic copies of the handouts are now available online for download, see: workshop handouts.

In addition, I have presented a poster on a tool for generating device-independent quizzes. We'd like to commercialize this tool so if your company is looking for something like this, please let me know. Q.

Centre for Mobile Education Research

May 2008

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Hybrid Apps with JavaFX

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