Jeff Dillon

Java: The XP Look and Feel
The Windows XP Look and Feel found in Java 1.4.2 and above is absolutely awesome. I really wish that Swing would have foucused on making a look and feel like this before. The company that I was previously employed by has two main installation products. One is a native windows product and the other is a Java product. The XP look and feel was so good that in certain places the Windows UI design team was producing screenshots of the Java product and showing it to the Windows developers to improve the Windows product. As an example, they actually wanted the native windows product to use the tabs (JTabbedPane) that appear in the Java XP look and feel. If you compare the two products even today, the native windows product still has uglier looking tabs.

I really hope the Java team continues to get to move ahead on desktop specific technologies even with J2EE and J2ME being so popular. The XP and GTK look and feel are really great.

Follow-up to My Mono/.NET comments
There were a few good points in my comments section that I wanted to respond to.

Comment: In Java you couldn't really choose not to write a portable program. Obviously this won't be the case in C#, but it doesn't mean you can't write a portable program.

I agree 100%. But, to me this is similar to how die-hard C and C++ developers say the same thing about C and C++. Yes, it is possible to write portable C++ and yes STL is theoretically very portable. But, it still has all kinds of problems and is harder than Java. Even if something is 95% portable, it is always that last 5% that is the killer.

So, to write a program that cross-platform capable, just avoid the Microsoft.Win32 namespace.

This is exactly what MS tried to do with Java when they first responded to it. "Stay away from com.microsoft.* packages, and you'll be fine". I think people on each side of the fence will never agree on the issue of whether it is more imporant to have a system which favors platform independence or allows you to do everything you need easily. (For example, some people would love to see Java/COM integration.) I have personally dealt with horrible issues resulting from trying to make C and C++ code portable. Unlike Java, .NET is not really focused on portability and therefore Mono may have a tough time. One outcome is that Mono becomes another Wine. Wine is pretty good, works for some things, but is not a real enterprise solution and is always catching up.

Don't get me wrong, Mono is a very cool project and I would like to see it suceed in order to shake things up and compete with MS. My only contention is that it might be a difficult project when your lead developer (MS) does not have a Community process and sees linux as the enemy to Windows.

Blogged on Ongoing already!
I am so excited. Today Tim Bray blogged a link to my blog today and I am getting lots of hits. I have been reading his blog for a long time, so it is very cool to get visibility after only one sun.com blog. I now feel pressure and am motivated to write more. My old blog was being hosted on my cable modem and would not take any serious traffic. Being hosted on sun.com is very nice for this reason.

I normally do not blog at work since it can take up too much time, but I just had to say that I am excited.