Seapegasus Blog

Saturday June 06, 2009

JavaOne: Toys are Us!

And now the JavaOne session everybody has been waiting for: James Gosling's Toy Show! Here a short rundown of the coolest tech demos we saw this morning:

Angela Caicedo and Simon Ritter are back, and this time they hacked a standard household wiimote. Simon brought a small white board and attached a few markers. He used an JavaFX app to triangulate the position of the markers with data from the wiimote IR sensors. He then projected a perspectively distorted image of a playing card onto the surface, and the image stayed in place even if he moved.

When he turned the board around, the app detected the motion and projected the backside of the playing card. :) It also supported more "motion sensor"-like features like shuffling to flip to a different card. To prove that there is no hidden magic in the board, he replaced the board with an opened white umbrella (again with markers) and projected an image of planet earth.

Continuing the them of "JavaFX is for all screens of your live", Angela presented her approach to a wiimote hack: Similar to her demo from last year she relied on a Minority Report-like glove with IR markers. As apposed to Simon, she can turn any white surface (such as a wall) into a "touch screen". In her demo she projected a canvas and a color palette, and move her finger in the air to paint lines and mix colors . She could reusue existing JavaFX features to animate a ball icon rolling along the drawn line--until the line ended and the ball dropped off the canvas. :)

Next Tor Norbye demoed his new JavaFX designer tool: He placed an object node onto the canvas and recorded 3 different keyframes, then he let JavaFX interpolate the animation. The end result had the textnode swing in and bounce off the floor to its intended position.

Tor also demoed a very userfriendly interface for binding components to values: You drag a line from one component to the other, and a menu of possible target values shows up that would make sense to bind. To give you an example: You may want to bind slider's left/right side to the video's start/end position, and a toggle button to the play/pause action. of course you can do that with all components and all properties (opacity, translation, color, rotation...). His tool allows you to save visual content for mobile and PC screens (and soon also TV).

We also learned of PlaySIM, a simulated SIM card (JavaCard) on a Sun SPOT. It allows you to set debugger breakpoints in live SIM card code. In the demo they used one Sun SPOT's motion sensor to trigger the menu of a phone (which was attached via a 2nd SPOT). check out playsim.dev.java.net for more details.

The FIRST robotics league brought one of their robots from this year's lunacy game: Robots throw balls and catch them in baskets. There are different periods in the game, e.g. one with human remote control, and one with autonomous robot control. The finals were very popular and filled the Georgia Super Dome. :) The robot on stage sucessfully collects balls, but then proceeded to throw them at James Gosling... Today's news is that from this year on (?) the students will be able to program robots in Java too (including on-device debugging), not only C/C++ (if I got that right).

The big highlight for the NetBeans Community was Sven Reimer's NetBeans platform-based application: A controller used in satellite ground stations. Gosling recollected when he used to analyze satellite data with a PDP8 (?) that had less power than a smart card... :) Sven's app ran in demo mode only since "some grumpy people didn't let us actually control satelites". ;( As a final surprise, Gosling became a honorable dream team member (well, he got the shirt) and received a copy of the community-translated (!) NetBeans platform book (originally in German).

Another interesting guest was Visuvi: Not only can you upload (cell phone cam or hi-res) images to their search engine and have them analyzed (E.g. to answer the question "who pointed that?"), but most importantly, the new image analysis technology is used for cancer research (e.g. you can search through a biopsy image database for visually similar cases).

Other demos included a micro financing app, a Solaris+JavaFX powered jukebox for starving musicians, a printer-scanner for teachers that scans student's test sheets as well as the answer sheet and then calculates the score.

The last demo was a video interview with the team around the Lincoln car that was on display in the Java Pavilion all week. The plan was to create a fast-driving drive-by-wire vehicle for the Realtime Java urban challenge. And Mr. Perrone refitted a stylish Lincoln Continental: He added batteries and a generator, self-diagnostic sensors and GPS, and finanly touch screen UI. The break lights and old speedometer are controlled electronically. They showed some cars on a test drive, but, sorry, I missed whether the Licoln ended up being remote controlled or not. (Leave a comment if you caught that please)

I think this year's message was: Different communities use Java technology in different ways. Astonishing (and inspiring) what you can do! :-)

Friday June 05, 2009

Mean Java Puzzlers, Swiss JavaFX usecases, and 3-D jME Games

While waiting for the NetBeans Platform development session to begin, let me quickly show you three other cool JavaOne 2009 sessions, and what I learned from them:

Java Puzzlers: Shlock and Awe

If you're not sure what that method does, it doesn't do what you think it does. Let the Java puzzler experts Bloch and Gafter introduce you to the pitfalls of the Java language - shlocking and awe-inspiring!

Java Technology for Gaming

The freely available Java3D game framework jMonkeyEngine solves many challenges that you will encounter when developing a Java 3D game. Learn how well-implemented collision detection and game physics add realism and immersion to your next killer game!

Technical Session: JavaFX Technology in Action: From Design Tool to Desktop, to Mobile Device

Canoo's Mike Mannion describes how his company used JavaFx to develop their Music Pinboard and then quickly migrated it from the browser to the desktop to mobile devices.

Wednesday June 03, 2009

Some Unsorted JavaOne Impressions

Did you see this year's nice JavaOne banners? Love the gradients and colors.

They look vaguely familiar though, don't you think?

Hm... ;-)

Cool things announced today: Blackberry, Sony, eBay, Oracle, they all love Sun, Java, or JavaFX (ranging from "respectively" to "all of the above")! There was a spiffy Sony Blueray presentation, the only thing I remember off the top of my head was this one "unique selling point" that made me laugh: "IM your friends while watching a movie!!!1!1!" Oh yeah? With NetBeans+Kenai.com you can even IM your friends as well as tweet, all while coding! Hah! Beat this, Blueray.

Seems I remember more of that demo than of Monday's general session. Someone please refresh my memory. You know, the segment where they had this mesmerizing "city lights by night" video loop in the background? Did I mention the video loop was exactly 8 seconds long? And that it was mesmerizing? o_O

(Heh. I just realized one of my colleagues here can make precisely this smilie face: o_O Very funny! Still trying to capture that on film.)

The big thing today of course was James Gosling's announcement of the store.java.com. Developers like you and I will be able to upload our Java apps, attach a price tag, and customers will be able to drag the app to their desktops to buy and install--pretty cool! You can join the beta program and vote on what buying method you prefer before the chosen one will be activated later this year. Presently there are free games like Solitaire and Runescape. But the private Beta is only available to US citizens, oh well...

Any beta store applicant here care to post a comment how you like it? (And most importantly: Did you get sucked into Runescape??) I talked to a guy after a session who said there were tags or something to specify whether your app was based on the jMonkeyEngine (and others)? Can anyone tell me whether these categories will be used used for licensing or packaging purposes?

Nandini actually mentioned the Java Store in her demo of the new visual JavaFX tools, just a few minutes before they officially announced it... I wonder whether she did that on purpose? :-P That would explain why the wireless was suddenly unusable in the hall, everyone tried to connect to tweet, blackberry, IM, skype, etc... Speaking of which, the wireless is called JavaOne (camel case), don't fall for the evil imposter JAVAONE (all caps).

Oh, and the JavaFX TV demo (JavaFX-written on-screen TV controls) memorably used the Big Buck Bunny open-source video: It's a cute short film, but the presenter was alert enough to call up a sports screen before it got to the scene where the squirrel KILLS THE BUTTERFLY!! I don't like this video. =-[ Nor can I warm up to the other open-source video, Elephant's Dream. Yes, I agree, it's extremely well done and creative, but the characters creep me out.

Oh, and I also went to the Maker Faire near San Mateo right before JavaOne, got some footage of steampunks and stuff, but no Mac/iMovie at hand right now.