Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Tuesday May 08, 2007

JavaFX at JavaOne

Well, the news is out. As you all know by now, JavaFX Script has been announced. It's in it's infancy and will evolve rapidly, but definitely worth looking at.

Please join me at the JavaFX hands on lab. It's lab 7280 on Thursday at 3:50pm in the hands on lab room. We'll have a kick-off by the lab author and JavaFX's creator (if scheduling works), then some labs for everyone to go through.

Tuesday August 01, 2006

Swing Labs in Los Angeles and OC It's official. We have Joshua Marinacci and Richard Bair coming in September to talk with not one, but two Java User Groups, the OC JUG. They'll come in and give us an idea of what's going on over in Swing Labs and Swing technologies in general. To be honest, the reason I finally reached out to Richard on this was Jim White's presentation on IFCX. Well, it wasn't exactly the presentation, so much as it was some of the peripheral discussion in this JUG meeting and others I've attended in the past. I think there are a large number of people who saw different things they liked/disliked about Java on the desktop 6 years ago and may or may not have looked at what's been happening in the last couple of years. So, I'm hoping to resolve some of that. ( Aug 01 2006, 09:10:11 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday June 08, 2006

Cool resumé tricks at LA JUG

On Tuesday, Kay Kennedy flew in from Washington (the state) to give the LA-JUG folks a run down on how to market yourself in the tech job market.

Now I've not had to search for a job for a while (I'm on year 6 here at Sun), so I had a bit to learn about the modern dance between employers, recruiters and recruitees.

Just a sample of the couple of things I walked away with:

• Listing on Dice or Monster may not be all that useful-- recruiters (including corporate) can't work with it (easily) and they likely have the ability to connect you with some of the better jobs
• Tweaking your resumé to come up on top in the search engines is part of the trick, part of that is listing all of the buzz words multiple times
• References on request is absolutely the right thing to do, some recruiters will mine your references if you supply them!
• There are some well known recruiting companies that are poorly behaved.... that's news to me

Thanks for coming by Kay-- definitely a different type of presentation-- glad to have you come in to present.

Monday August 01, 2005

Swing and SWT on Windows Vista

It looks like Charles isn't posting with his normal frequency, so this little tidbit hasn't gotten it's normal publicity. :)

It seems a Sun guy has posted some screenshots of various Java apps running in the newly beta'd Windows Vista.

Looking at the screenshots, you'll notice that the Java 1.4.2 and later Swing implementations do a kick butt job of reaching into the bowels of Windows for the right graphics to build a Swing GUI in a native look-n-feel way, but the comparitively native SWT has some kind of leftover peers for buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons.

My previous conclusion on SWT and Swing is that developers need to be conscious of what they're getting into and make the choice that's right for them. I still think that's the case for now. This is just one more datapoint for developers.

Admittedly, the Swing guys may have just done this engineering before Windows went Beta, but I doubt it (I'm not really in a position to know). I'm also sure the SWT guys will be all over this one. But what is the opportunity cost of trying to build/maintain all of the code that does the peer stuff on Windows (old and new), GTK, Mac OS, Motif, etc.?

Monday June 27, 2005

Glassfish, weird postings and software religion

Late last week, John mentioned this posting of Marc Fleury's when he and I were talking about Glassfish. I wanted to respond, but I knew our guys were still working on Glassfish, and things would change. For those who don't know, Glassfish, the RI of the next J2EE, is now open source under the CDDL license.

So the weird part of the posting to me is Marc felt strongly enough to post about something he claims to have thought irrelevant. If it's irrelavent, then why post? Marc: now that the licencing terms have changed to what Sun wanted to do all along will you reconsider your words?

My guess is no.

I've seen this before. Why does Marc appear to be threatened? If what he says is true (it's not) then why are you threatened by more open source code? Could it be that Marc (and some others) have crossed to the religion threshold? You see this in the Linux arena: people so rabidly pro-Linux that anything that isn't Linux, in their eyes, is bad and should be attacked.

Leave the religion behind Marc.

Tuesday April 05, 2005

April LA Java Users Group and standing "on line"

Thanks to Jon Cruz for coming in and talking about internationalization in Java at tonight's LA JUG. It was a very interesting topic to me. Mostly because as a US dweller (I've never been fortunate enough to travel out of the country-- even Mexico which is only 2 hours away), I suffer from not seeing the everyday need for internationalization the way most of the world runs into it. Probably mostly because of our nationalized and pervasive media, we don't have too many regionalisms.

SidebarThe one I normally think of first is "on line". If you're on the east coast of the US, you stand "on line". To those of us on the west coast, online refers to being on the network. To us, you stand "in line". There are others, like in St. Louis there is a deragatory term "hoosier", where elsewhere that's actually a good thing.

Surprising things for me out of this preso:

• Resource bundles can include java classes
• Internationalizing your code may save your bacon in a number of other ways than getting your code portable
• Windows codepages can be challenging to deal with (okay, so that wasn't so surprising)
• Layout for Swing is pretty straightforward when internationalizing, but many J2EE apps probably have some other issues
• Internationalization and accessability will play well together, giving the developer a wide array of solutions without having to spend valuable coding time on it... if they use Java's technologies correctly

One quick resource to mention, I18n G.A.L.has some interesting pointers and some interesting info. Even a link to the latest IETF April Fools joke. My favorite was always "sheep over sonet".

Also, I've been accused of not updating the blog often enough. Sorry! I've been in the middle of laptop reconfiguration so I can demo interoperability of the Sun Java System Messaging and Calendar Servers with Outlook 2003 on Windows (by way of the Sun Java System Outlook Connector). All of this overhead has meant I've spent less time being cerebral and blogging my equally cerebral (at least, as cerebral as I get) thoughts. I'm out of the dark spot of the woods now. :)

Tuesday March 29, 2005

A brief experience with SWT

Okay, so one of the reasons I've not blogged a whole lot lately is that I've not been reading blogs very much lately. Mostly that was due to a large workload, but it was also because I'd never really settled on an RSS/Atom newsreader.

So I poked at the search engine with "java RSS newsreader atom" and it came back with RSSOwl. Hmmm.... This is weird-- it's written in Java and has different packaging for different platforms. Ah well-- let's grab the Solaris one. One quick download later, I fire it up and.... man is this thing ugly. It's using the Motif look and feel. Why did they code that in as the default. No big deal. I need to modify the startup script it came with to use Tiger anyway.

vi the run.sh, add in -Dswing.defaultlaf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel, set the path to Tiger and run it. It still looks horrid. What's with this?

Well, you've probably figured it out from the title. It was written with SWT, so the "Solaris" version they distribute is really "Solaris SPARC using Motif". Had I tried to download the same Solaris build on my laptop, it would have, of course, failed.

Besides that, Sun's been shipping Gnome since Solaris 9! C'mon guys, if you're going to decide to code for each platform specifically (which you've done as soon as you decided on SWT), at least make good use of what the platform gives you.

Ah well, I could hack with the source, or I can go find another newsreader. I'll go for the latter....

Sunday February 27, 2005

Java Source

Peter Kessler, one of the guys working on the Hotspot VM, has authored this blog, whihc addresses one of those things that comes up occasionally at the JUG meetings. If you want to get into the source to see how things work, fix that particular bug that is quite important to you, or even help direct the enhancements as the Java community moves on to Mustang (future J2SE), then take a look at this blog.

You are all JCP members, aren't you?

Thursday January 13, 2005

Kick butt threading support?

Dave Edstrom, another Sun guy, sent me a link to this article. This is something I've felt to be true for quite some time. Sun and others have done things like -Xautopar for compilers, but to really be able to make use of threading, you need to have good language support and a programming model that makes it easy.

Realistically, this is the quiet story that Java/J2EE have done well. It only gets better with things like JSR-166. If you've written a servlet, some session beans and some entity beans in recent years, you've written something capable of being highly multithreaded. Putting it on one of these will most likely make it run very, very quickly.

If you're not coding with a language that has kick-butt threading support, it's time to start considering it....

Monday December 13, 2004

A Week of SeeBeyond

This week I'm spending some time with our partner SeeBeyond. There was a relationship announced a few weeks back about Sun and SeeBeyond working together. I have a good grasp of where we interface, but it'll be good to get more in depth with what value comes together between SeeBeyond's ICANN and Sun's Java Enterprise System.

And this just a week or so after hearing a presentation from a SeeBeyond employee on the topic of Maven. :)

Tuesday December 07, 2004

Maven at LA-JUG

Thanks very much to Andreas Schaefer for braving the rain here in so cal to come and talk with us at the LA-JUG.

Well covered. I probably need to find a new project to work with Maven on now. :)

p.s.: Sorry for the exceptionally long time between blog entries-- I've just been that busy!

Thursday October 21, 2004

NetBeans 4.0 Refactoring is Cool!

Okay, we don't all stick to software development processes and planning when writing quick little utilities, do we. When we're writing little bits of code that aren't likely to touch much else, we don't really think through things like variable names, class names and method names.

Still, we want it to make some sense, right?

Well, what do you do when you're 4-5 classes into a program and you realize you want to change a method name and a variable name to go with the rest of it. Hats off the the open source NetBeans project-- in 4.0 you can just right click and say "Refactor -> Rename [method | class | variable]". It took little more than a few seconds to do something that historically would have been a lot of effort.

Too bad this project doesn't even care about the performance profiler-- if it did I could open the shrinkwrap on that new toy...

Great job guys!

Friday September 10, 2004

LA-JUG's JSR-168 presentation by Gluecode

This last Tuesday we had the latest installment of the LA-JUG. I'd meant to post a followup after the meeting, but have lacked the time to do so until now.

First of all, thanks much to Gluecode for presenting. Especially to Dave (I think is the name) the presenter, who had to slap together the presentation on short notice. Dave's an EG member (I believe), so I can appreciate how it's hard to take a few minutes out to explain what you've been working on for the last 12 to 18 months to people in the room that range from neophyte to expert.

Then afterwards we all went to the local watering hole (with authentic Thai food!-- an inside joke) and debated the state of the union. I had a good conversation with some of the Gluecode folks. Hopefully after that, they realize we Sun folk are pretty open to different ideas and different ways of looking at things.

There was some concern about how the JSR-168 EG sees things, but as I'd explained, my experience with the product team for the Sun Java System Portal Server and our Sun Java Studio teams seems to indicate nothing but JSR-168 support and momentum. PAPI is the way of the past. JSR portlets and JSF are the way to go for new development.

Next month should be lots of fun, as we're going to bring Craig McClanahan in to cover JSF, Creator and other things from Craig's rich past. I hope some of you can come in for that!

Thursday July 22, 2004

Java's future according to Jack

If you missed JavaOne, then you missed this quite humorous flash animation.

One of the neat things about vectored graphics is that they showed this on the BIG screen at JavaOne (those who were there know how big a screen it was). I used to work quite a bit with graphics long ago, so I'm glad to see things like SVG and TinySVG coming along. This thing just proves how cool such stuff is. Some of our J2ME guys showed SVG scaled down on devices at JavaOne. Cool stuff.

It's a bit Sun oriented, but anyone who follows Sun/Microsoft should at least get a chuckle out of it.

Wednesday July 14, 2004

Hey Jonathan, ZD Net gets JES!

There's an interesting blog entry by some ZDNet folks over here.

They've noticed that those guys in Armonk have a bunch of software that promises to solve problems for customers, but it doesn't all work together. They also seem to think that said company makes up for this bug in their products by injecting services.

Great, now that they get that, maybe they'll take notice of Sun's Java Enterprise System!