Daniel Brookshier's Blog

August 2005 Archives

TilePile - Making the art of Java really about art

Greg Barton has created what I think is the first project in the GELC and possibly in all of Java.net that might be the first Java software you would find in the art classroom. Conceived by a professional artist and a very smart Java developer, this open source and non-commercial application is available to anyone that wants to use it. This software could make its way to your local high school or university art teacher. read on to learn more from the developer, Greg Barton. Take a look at the TilePile Project too and if you think it is cool as I do, look up your old art teacher and send them Greg's way.

The application is currently used in the classroom. As a part of the Lincoln mural project in Philadelphia, Greg Barton and his brother in law, set up five middle school art classrooms with Tilepile setups. (Two computers donated by IBM, tile racks and grids, and buckets 'o' tile.) The students use the system create tile square sections that will be included in the mural under the direction of volunteers from the Mural Arts program in Philly. Also look at this page on the Mural Arts site about the project, too.

Tell us a little about yourself (work background, hobbies, education, things we would be surprised to know).

I have an MS in computer science, focusing in artificial intelligence. I'm currently working as a GUI programmer for a small startup company based in Florida. My hobbies are playing the bass trombone and messing around with my open source projects. People would be surprised to know that I'm distantly related to the queen of England. I'd be surprised by that, too... :P

Are you a member of any Java user groups?

I'm a member of the Dallas area JavaMug and lead their Rules/AI special interest group.

Why did you start TilePile?

My brother in law is a muralist and needed some software to help him assemble a 30x300 foot glass tile mural. (Well over 1 million tiles.) Java to the rescue! :)

Tell us about the success of the project. Who is using it and how has it helped?

It is currently being used most heavily by my brother in law. One mural has been completed (the Barrio Anita mural in Tucson, AZ: http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/50846.php) and another is being constructed for the Constitution Center in Philadelphia as a part of their Lincoln exhibit.

Other artists in the Philadelphia area have used it to construct murals as well.

What is the project's current status and plans for
the future?

Currently it's stable. What it's lacking most now is good programmer and user documentation. Planned features for the immediate future include splitting off the data serving and station control functions into different servers, a servlet based mural data server, and integration with outside image editing software like Photoshop and GIMP.

What kind of help are you looking for on this
project?

Testing on Mac OSX, mainly. Also folks with experience optimizing Java2D performance would be nice. Finally, anyone who loves writing user docs. (Like that'll ever happen! :P )

Any suggestions for GELC or Java.net?

Keep up the good work, and give Dan a raise. :)

Take a look at the TilePile Project too and if you think it is cool as I do, look up your art teacher and send them Greg's way.

Here are a few images that show that the TilePile application is truly a work of art. Great job Greg!!!

g!

Lincoln mural

Lincoln mural with grid grouping overlay

Lincoln mural, excluding sections with out of stock tile colors

NOTE: All artwork copyright 2003-2005 Joshua Sarantitis

CVE and Wippog project Spotlight

The Wippog project and the CVE project with uses it has just entered a stable release. This spotlight talks with the project owner to look at a great mix and a cool way to work with dynamic interfaces.

Project Names & Links: Cve - Cooperative Visual Environment Wippog Transition definition language for reactive systems Project Owner Names: Cve (Ventriglia) - Wippog ( paolodt, bottoni) City: Rome Country:Italy

I'm domenico ventriglia. I'm 33 years old. I'm project manager in a group that include the most important Italian newspaper. I work on managing of on-line service. I collaborate with computer science university department in Rome

As you may know, I do talks on Java. Have you talked at any Java conferences?

Yes, I was speaker in java Italian conference in Milan 1999 . Main conferences:

http://ftp.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/vl/hcc2003.html
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/v/Ventriglia:Domenico.html
http://www.dsmforum.org/events/DSVL02/Papers.html

Tell us a about the project and why you started it.

Wippog is a resourse- based model called Wippog and a relative rule based language for multiset transformations. This is a general purpose engine and the key word is configuration. Use cases are: system configuration, human-computer interaction, error management and visual interaction management (cve project is a particular case).

Since your project is released, do you have any success stories?

Wippog project is used in many university projects (for example cve project). Wippog isn’t a commercial product but it shows in a practical way a innovative abstract model. It well work.

The Wippog is a language and a computation environment to express behaviour in reactive systems and heterogeneous components

The CVE (Cooperative Visual Environment) project is a software platform supporting the generation and the execution of visual interactive environments. Each environment is defined as a network of components of three types: Excutors, Observers and Presenters. In CVE, Executors are responsible for managing computational resources and activities, while Observers are responsible for formatting views to be displayed by Presenters. Moreover, the observers are able to interpret the events generated by the user on the presentation elements and to consequently generate requests to the executors, or adjust presentation aspects, according to the meaning of the event. A notification mechanism ensures that state changes in the executor are reported to the registered observers to update their presentations. Actually, we defined environments able to manage visual sentences (graphic editors). In this context we have implemented independent software components to manage generic graphic relations, user interaction and Finite-State Machines.

What is the project's current status and plans for the future?

Wippog is included in several university projects. This month we have closed some bugs and we have improved gui interface. In the last month no new bug have been indicated.

Project Spotlight on JEDI - They are teaching Java in the Philippines!

Sometimes you are surprised when you find someone in the world has the same passions as you. This time it is in the Philippines. One of our newest projects in the GELC is JEDI. JEDI is short for Java Education & Development Initiative. Quite a mouth full, so JEDI is a much better name. But what is JEDI all about?

The initiative is a partnership between the University of the Philippines Java Research and Development Center (UP JRDC) and Sun Microsystems in the Philippines. With the aid of the government and a slew of volunteers, teachers, and administrators, the goal of the project is to make Java a core part of the computer science curriculum in that country. The project is creating and supporting teaching materials and collecting tools for teaching Java in the Philippine university system and its high schools.

JEDI equips teachers with the knowledge, skills and resources for success. To do that, they needed to come up with a set of items, rather than just teaching materials. Here is a list of the primary things that the project provides:

• Free access to courseware and resources such as teaching slides, teacher
and student manuals, sample exercises and exams and various reference materials.
• Training on the courses themselves as well as how to teach the courses.
• Free software such as NetBeans, J2SE and various development tools and platforms that are used
for illustration and actual hands-on exercises, lab work and research work.
• Online community collaborating on JEDI through the Java.Net tools.
• Access to a JEDI Help Desk to help the teachers in using the course material.
• Participation in various JEDI events for students and faculty such as competitions, symposia and others

JEDI was launched in the Philippines on February 2005 and has already racked up some great statistics:

• 3 courses rolled-out
• 3 new courses being developed
• 29 JEDI member schools
• 63 teachers trained
• over 13,500 students to benefit
• Coordinating with 7 countries for implementation

As you can see, this is a lot more than just their project at java.net. They are in fact organizing a lot of people to create this operation. Java.net in this context is the hub where a lot of the information is manages and the community interacts. This is a truly different model than many open source projects.

The model used by JEDI is catching on. The GELC and Sun are working hard to add other projects like this in the general education area in Australia, Canada, and Korea. Also, the JEDI project is reaching out to other countries that can share the same materials and infrastructure.

There is a lot going on in this project. Take a look at it. You might want to help spread the word that there are some great resources for teaching Java.

Open Source for Capitalists, Part 1 - Free prize inside

How do you make money from open source software?

I got the idea for today's blog from my friend Larry Snyder at Recursion Software. The question sounds ancient to me for some reason. It seems like a riddle passed down through the generations, perhaps with roots in mysticism or in ancient scrolls of the Tao or Zen. I can imagine Aristotle pondering on the subject. Perhaps I can at least guide the way. It's not as hard as it seems to answer, just hard to grasp for companies focused on profit margins. Making money from open source is like one hand clapping.

I'll break this up into a bunch of blogs. Here is the tentative list of subjects.

• Free Prize Inside
• Examples are Free, Right?
• Building Bigger Mousetraps
• Donations To A Worthy Cause

• Working In The Commons

Free Prize Inside

Seth Godin, who wrote "Free Prize Inside" and other Marketing books, might say that if you are a software company, the free side is the prize. If you are thinking about the cool toy in the cereal box, you understand what Seth is thinking. As a child, I remember a horrid cereal called Ruskets. It was like a brick of cardboard that you put in milk. Invented by by someone who was a 7th Day Adventists as I recall (vegetarians before it was fashionable). It is amazing how good these wheat cardboard-like bricks tasted with milk when there is a prize inside every box. The funny thing was, this was the whole marketing campaign at the time with "Free Prize in Every Bx" emblazoned on the side.

Think crackerjacks but leave out anything that tastes good. So the only thing left that is of value is the prize. I would eat as much as I could stuff myself with. Why? To get the next box and the next free prize.

Back to crackerjacks, they still sell while Ruskets are a memory. Why? Because there is value in the taste 'and' you get a free prize. So take something good and make it better by adding something special. You could add a software game or a personal organizer or additional tools. All of these can come from open source with only sweat equity to package them up with your product.

Look for example at adding a utility. Imagine your core database product is ten thousand dollars. Since it supports JDBC, why not include a lot of free tools from the open source world. That's a good prize and can make you look good by just including a few binary releases of free stuff. People love free stuff - even if it was free to the person giving it out.

Remember, it is not always about your product, but the experience of the product. Eating Ruskets alone is awful. Eating Ruskets with a FREE toy is an enjoyable breakfast. A database is nice, but a database with a FREE management tool is better.

I am leaning toward sending along a cool game. Engineers need to play, right? You can even get creative and somehow use the product to make the game work. To top it off, you release the game into open source. Now you have an example that uses your product, you have an open source project with your company name on it, and you have that free prize in every box.

Please pass the milk! I have a lot of cereal to eat.

Do you know some cool free prizes in open source that can be included with commercial software? Let me know!

For reference, here is a nice article: What Business Can Learn From Open Source.

Project Spotlight on JEDI - They are teaching Java in the Philippines!

Sometimes you are surprised when you find someone in the world has the same passions as you. This time it is in the Philippines. One of our newest projects in the GELC is JEDI. JEDI is short for Java Education & Development Initiative. Quite a mouth full, so JEDI is a much better name. But what is JEDI all about?

The initiative is a partnership between the University of the Philippines Java Research and Development Center (UP JRDC) and Sun Microsystems in the Philippines. With the aid of the government and a slew of volunteers, teachers, and administrators, the goal of the project is to make Java a core part of the computer science curriculum in that country. The project is creating and supporting teaching materials and collecting tools for teaching Java in the Philippine university system and its high schools.

JEDI equips teachers with the knowledge, skills and resources for success. To do that, they needed to come up with a set of items, rather than just teaching materials. Here is a list of the primary things that the project provides:

• Free access to courseware and resources such as teaching slides, teacher
and student manuals, sample exercises and exams and various reference materials.
• Training on the courses themselves as well as how to teach the courses.
• Free software such as NetBeans, J2SE and various development tools and platforms that are used
for illustration and actual hands-on exercises, lab work and research work.
• Online community collaborating on JEDI through the Java.Net tools.
• Access to a JEDI Help Desk to help the teachers in using the course material.
• Participation in various JEDI events for students and faculty such as competitions, symposia and others

JEDI was launched in the Philippines on February 2005 and has already racked up some great statistics:

• 3 courses rolled-out
• 3 new courses being developed
• 29 JEDI member schools
• 63 teachers trained
• over 13,500 students to benefit
• Coordinating with 7 countries for implementation

As you can see, this is a lot more than just their project at java.net. They are in fact organizing a lot of people to create this operation. Java.net in this context is the hub where a lot of the information is manages and the community interacts. This is a truly different model than many open source projects.

The model used by JEDI is catching on. The GELC and Sun are working hard to add other projects like this in the general education area in Australia, Canada, and Korea. Also, the JEDI project is reaching out to other countries that can share the same materials and infrastructure.

There is a lot going on in this project. Take a look at it. You might want to help spread the word that there are some great resources for teaching Java.

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