Sun Tech Days, Milan

Today was the final day of Sun Tech Days in Milan Italy. I spent it doing a video interview and attending two technical sessions.

The Video

I started the day by doing a 10 minute video interview with NetBeans evangelist Roman Strobl. Roman is an extremely visible person in the NetBeans community. He does sessions on NetBeans in events like Tech Days all over the world. He's a very popular blogger -- he told me at one point his blog got more traffic than Jonathan Schwartz's blog, and he also does lots of screencasts and podcasts on NetBeans-related topics. In fact, a great way to stay current with NetBeans is to see Roman's blog. Liana Vargharsakian of Sun's Developer Outreach team was kind enough to be the camera person for this session. I'm hoping to have the video available on NetBeans.tv by next week.

I asked Roman to give his insights into what features in NetBeans 6 he thought were the most significant. He cited things like integrated support in NetBeans for scripting languages like Ruby as well as support for the Swing Application Framework, something that makes it really easy to build desktop GUI applications. The video covers some more features. But to get a fuller picture of all the great new things in NetBeans 6, see What's New in NetBeans IDE 6.0.

The Sessions

I also attended two technical sessions -- both of them covering how to make user interfaces (UIs) for applications look better. The first session, titled "Swing Back With a Zing," covered how to use new features in Swing and Java 2D to make desktop applications look good. Sun Technology Evangelist, Sridhar Reddy presented this one. The other session, titled "Java ME: Extreme GUI Makeover With Ajax Mashups for Mobile Devices," covered how to make a mobile device-based application look cool (or cooler). This one was presented by Sun Technolgy Evangelist, Doris Chen.

Reddy's session covered a lot of territory that I was already familiar with, primarily because I had done a deep dive video interview with Sun client architect, Chet Haase, a few months ago on Filthy Rich Clients. In the interview, Chet covered many of the things that Reddy covered, including the timing framework, gradients, and blurs -- approaches that give Swing UIs pizzazz. In fact, Reddy encouraged the audience to get a copy of Chet's (and Roman Guy's) book titled Filthy Rich Clients. In the session, Sridhar also addressed things like the use of splash screens and modern look and feels such as Nimbus.

I particularly enjoyed Reddy's demos that illustrated some of the techniques for improving Swing app UIs. In one demo, Reddy showed a real estate application that did animated sorting -- when you sort a column of data, the rows move up an down to assume their proper position. The application also presented slider bars that a user could move to limit or expand the range of the results. Another demo illustrated two techniques for alerting a user to an invalid entry: icons and animation. In the animation approach, the entry field appears to vibrate if the entry in invalid.

Chen's session was perhaps more interesting to me because I really didn't know much about techniques for creating cool UIs in application running on mobile devices. To demonstrate the techniques, Chen took an application that was already pretty cool and then compared it with a similar application that looked even cooler. The base application does a search for restaurants based on input critera such as type and location. Chen searched for coffee shops in a zip code area around Santa Clara, California. The application also mashes up with the Yahoo Maps service so that a user can display a map that shows the location of a selected restaurant. Chen selected a coffee shop and then displayed a map that showed its location. This application uses Java ME's lcdui API to build the user interface. It's a rather nice applcation, but with a relatively "plain Jane" UI.

To spice up the application, Chen used Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to build the UI. SVG provides a compact format for graphics, making it an ideal graphics format for resource-constrained devices such as mobile phones. Beyond that, SVG is an XML-based format, so that an SVG graphic can be manipulated simply by accessing and updating its data. NetBeans provides very good support for SVG graphics. Chen showed how NetBeans could be used to upgrade the application. Using the NetBeans Mobile Visual Designer, Chen rebuilt the UI with SVG graphics. Chen then ran the application, and the improvement to the UI was readily apparent.

If you want to see the source code for the upgraded application, go to the ME Application Developer's Project. Then look for Yahoo! Local Search client.

Final Thoughts

Much of my thinking about Sun Tech Days, Milan mirrors what Dana Nourie said about Sun Tech Days, Rome. The sessions were very good and the speakers very professional. Perhaps the two highlights for me were (1) meeting the excellent people who plan for and implement events like this, and (2) getting to talk to attendees and learning more about what they do and what they need from Sun. As a writer on the staff of java.sun.com, I hope these connections and these insights will help me better serve the needs of our audience.

Arrividerci Sun Tech Days, Milano.