Richard Bair's Blog

Aerith is free!

The Aerith source code has just been released to the aerith.dev.java.net project. With this milestone I thought I'd just blog a bit about the backstory that went into Aerith. Hopefully, by the time you're done reading this, you won't stone us for some pretty hacked up code.

Aerith was a really fun project to work on. We sort of had an idea for what we wanted to do for JavaOne. We had a lot of fun doing the Joplin music player the year before and really wanted to get back up on stage this year with something even cooler. Romain had a lot of demos lying around. The client group had this sweet intro screen idea and Romain had already mocked up a UI that would form the basis of the Aerith look.

Every year James Gosling holds a kind of "tryouts" for keynote demos. We didn't know when those tryouts would be held, so we sent a few emails to find out. What we found was that we had about a week to get the demo finished before the tryouts. I was at home at the time and had to say goodbye to the wife and kid for the next few days.

Romain, Josh and I setup a war room in one of the conference rooms here on campus. As all good war rooms, ours was stocked with food, liquid nourishment (water for me, on a diet :-)), and pizza (so much for the diet). Oh, and chocolate cake. No "Romain" war room is complete without chocolate cake.

In three days of intense coding (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Usually about 18 hours+ each day) we wrote the entire map viewer and editor, and part of the applet. The original applet contained only the 3d "twinkle" code. (For those familiar with Romain's blog, Twinkle is one of the projects he released that we reused for this demo). With that, the demo was more or less feature complete. Later that week I added what we called the "Indiana Jones" viewer in the applet. Otherwise, bugfixes occupied our time. And endless tweaks to get things up to Romains standards.

It was also a lot of fun to tryout for James' keynote and finally make it into Jeff Jackson's keynote on Tuesday morning. I always have a blast at JavaOne, and love getting up on stage. Even if I am boring to watch :-).

The moral of this story (if there is one, besides diet's and war rooms not getting along so well) is that a sizeable portion of the Aerith code is very, very raw. It wasn't written as a "best practices" application, or to be maintained. It has a lot of bugs, is difficult to setup, needs a better build script, and nobody knows how the 3d stuff works besides Romain.

It was written to show off what is possible with Swing/Java. It was written to demo well. And it was written because it was fun to do. I think in all three respects it was a home run. Especially the last one: it was a lot of fun.

I think there is a great deal of potential in Aerith as a consumer application. We're looking for individuals who want to move Aerith to the next level. I'd be stoked to see it deployed and working with real people's data in real world situations. That'd really make my day.

So, this makes 3 blogs in 3 days. If I keep this up, I'll have my yearly quota down by the end of the week!

Comments

• I'm missgin Romain. Do you know if he will come back?

  Posted by: imjames on June 28, 2006 at 03:49 PM

• If he doesn't, I'll fly to France, drug him, and bring him back :-)

  Posted by: rbair on June 28, 2006 at 04:32 PM

• Is there an webstart somewhere?

  Posted by: ilazarte on June 29, 2006 at 06:41 AM

• ilazarte: Unforunately, not yet. I need a public server running Java EE 5. Anybody have one freely available? ;-)

  Posted by: rbair on June 29, 2006 at 08:38 AM

• Romain was presenting Aerith today in Versailles (France). No chocolate cake for us, but at least there were free sandwiches and a nice demo of Aerith (along with prototypes of Matisse, JSR295 & JSR296 which all played along nicely).
  - Chris

  Posted by: chris_e_brown on June 29, 2006 at 11:23 AM

• In case anyone is interested, I just posted instruction on how to get Aerith up and running on OS X. Wasn't very hard, but thought I would let other know what is needed in case you were having problems. Check it out here.

  Posted by: serff on June 29, 2006 at 09:52 PM

• serff: Awesome! I'll see if Josh can add a link on the Aerith main page.

  Posted by: rbair on June 30, 2006 at 07:04 AM

• Richard,Please add some basic "getting started" instructions.to the project... For example, when I try to run the JNLP version, I get a message that I do not have the correct version of the JRE installed... What version does Aerith need?
  Thanks,-JohnR

  Posted by: johnreynolds on July 11, 2006 at 07:13 AM

• Uh,Please ignore my previos comment... I should NEVER try these things before my morning cofee.Your "Getting started" guide is staring me right in the face ;-)-JohnR

  Posted by: johnreynolds on July 11, 2006 at 07:15 AM

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