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JavaFX: Really Challenging

Filed under: javafx on Thursday Oct 29, 2009

Have you see the monthly challenges over at JFXStudio ?

All the entries have to have less than 30 lines or 3000 charcters of code. Last month the theme was Time, this month its the number 5. Numerologically speaking, the number 5 goes hand in hand with sociability, and a tendency to excess. Guess which member of the JavaFX team picked that one ?


And ProJavaFX co-author Jim Weaver has been running a JavaFX challenge of his own.

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Java Store in final stages before open

Filed under: javafx javase javastore on Wednesday Oct 28, 2009

The Java Store team here at Sun is in the final stage of readying things to fling open the doors to shoppers in the next week or so !

This means one more tweak of the store front: just like in a physical store, polishing signage, perfecting the display areas and checkouts: in this case making the final UI changes to the all-JavaFX desktop app that showcases all the Java and JavaFX applications in stock and allows purchase and installation.

And it means final verification of the apps that will be on the shelves of the store on the day it opens - approaching 50 already, as participants in the beta program will already know - with more applications, ranging from free to paid, to come. All coming in at the back of the store, the Java Warehouse, which has been pretty busy of late.

So if you have a Java or JavaFX app that's looking for an audience (like, perhaps the 60-70m that download the JRE each month...), you should stay tuned to the Planetarium. Much more in the coming weeks !

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Launch parties for Java ME SDK for Mac and NetBeans 6.8 ?

Filed under: javafx javame netbeans on Tuesday Oct 27, 2009

Last week was a pretty busy one, with the release of Java ME SDK for Mac (early access), and the NetBeans 6.8 beta.

The Java ME SDK is the all-in-one phone to Blu-Ray app development kit, and the news is that its now available on the Mac platform too. Ready for the final NetBeans 6.8 release on December 1st, whose beta has already had a bunch of promising reviews for the new features, like zapping up the JavaFX code editing  and hinting niceties that Tor has often mentioned.

It's strange no-one suggested doing home launch parties for them. They can be such fun !

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How would you rate JavaFX ?

Filed under: javafx on Friday Oct 02, 2009

Don't bottle up any unexpressed opinions about JavaFX, take the survey.

Mixed in with the usual snoozeville multichoice questions about the kind of project you work on, you get to rate the current feature set and rank the importance of new features the team's working on: tooling, more controls, performance.

When was the last time you did anything anonymous on the internet so quick ?

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JVM Language Summit inspiration

Filed under: multilanguage on Thursday Oct 01, 2009

It's hard to believe that the JVM Language Summit is only a year old, and the recent second iteration appears to have been a great success.

Hopefully soon you'll be able to watch the talks online, like last year's, but in the meantime all the talk materials are online, and there are some home video style vignettes here. For a concise written summary, take a look at these short summaries of day one, day two, and day three. All the LOLs and OMGs are archived here. Organizer and JSR 292 lead John Rose was inspired by the Greats, even as sartorial inspiration was reportedly in shorter supply.

As you will hear on the Java Posse, language success comes with great responsibility: Noop take heed. This new language (No-awp) for the JVM (or the idea of one) was introduced; the dust is still settling as to whether this year's Fan is going to storm the developer world, or just its own coffee cup.

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New JavaFX User Group

Filed under: javafx on Tuesday Sep 29, 2009

Java User Groups have a long history. As you can see, they have spread all over the world.

Some of them have turned into whole conferences !

And now there's a new (second, third ?)  JavaFX users group, just down the road from the Planetarium.

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Selling applications

Filed under: javafx javastore on Monday Sep 28, 2009

Since the announcement of the Java Store at the last JavaOne, the team has been busy. The warehouse is really taking shape now, and the store front smells of new paint with its final redesign (thanks for the comments). There's a rumor that the cash registers may arrive real soon. And best of all, the shelves are fast filling up with the kind of assortment of games, facebook and twittery map style apps you come to expect from an app store (whether people actually come or not).

Stores are all the rage, because you can find what they you want.

Rather than being told at a creepy party.

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Java ME Watch

Filed under: javame on Thursday Sep 17, 2009

...Java ME too has plenty to say.

While some are worrying about which market segment Java ME will rule, the Opera Mini browser, the leading mobile browser, which runs on Java ME phones, shipped a new beta which is getting some great reviews. Like competitor BOLT, which also runs on Java ME phones, it does what seems to be impossible: faster browsing on small devices through cellular networks by using a compression server.

Developers looking into the Swing inspired LWUIT framework now have a book to help them out, while the LWUIT team is looking forward to what's to come in the next version. You can hear one company's experience with LWUIT on the latest Java Mobility podcast.

See more on LWUIT in this new series of short videos on a range of Java ME topics, with shorts on Java Device Test Framework, JSR 290, and  too.

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JavaFX Watch....on TV

Filed under: javafx on Wednesday Sep 16, 2009

Continuing in yesterday's vein, there's as much to say about JavaFX.

No doubt you saw the first real step towards JavaFX in your living room, with the announcement from Amino Communications to put JavaFX TV in its range of futuristic egg-shaped TV set-top boxes.

There's also been much talk of the new features in JavaFX 1.2, with a typically thoughtful and useful look at the new layout containers from Swing veteran Amy Fowler (and another tutorial here), and a neat feed reader from Jim Weaver here, and a nice blog on the RSS reader capabilities in JavaFX now here.

Since the UK's Guardian newspaper opened up all its news content to developers, there's a new JavaFX tag cloud navigator, accompanied by an interesting writeup of the creator's experiences with JavaFX and comparisons with Flash.

The JavaFX team pushed out a minor 1.2.1 update of the SDK and runtime, containing a number of bug fixes, new samples and performance improvements. Performance continues to be a strong driver for the next release, as you can see from Really Hip Smart Dude Richard Bair's 100,000 node blog.

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JDK Watch: Back to school

Filed under: javase jdk7 on Tuesday Sep 15, 2009

What with zipping all over the place to talk to folks about using JavaFX, and the quarterly JCP EC meeting, the Janitor has so much news saved up !

Things are never dull around the JDK, and in the back to school rush, there's been plenty going on. Sadly, the Swing Application Framework hasn't reached a point where its ready to be included in JDK 7, but most all of the other features are on track since milestone 4 was released. As you can see in the latest builds, the team continues to tweak the new garbage collector and Project Coin announced its additions to the Java language.

Tomorrow, its the start of the annual JVM language summit, with a great looking schedule lined up. It seems that there's another language other than Ruby and Python: Duby (ok, its a hybrid) that's now using invokedynamic to speed its execution.

There's also more signs of developers trying out JDK 7. The new Filesystem API designed in JSR 203 seems to be a major attraction, indeed, for some, enough in itself to justify an upgrade. And there are more signs that its going to be fast, especially when Jigsaw is included.

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JavaFX Roundup

Filed under: javafx on Friday Aug 28, 2009

From this detailed article about the new mixin feature in the language that replaces the potentially slow multiple inheritence, to a episode three of a continuing series about a new MVC based framework for building form based applications in JavaFX, there's been lots to say about JavaFX in the last week or so.

A couple of new games zoomed into view. As have some deeper reviews of JavaFX technology from those who have actually rolled up their sleeves and used it. Leading perhaps, to a remarkably precient (yet incomplete!) prediction of what is to come in the next version.

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See you at Devoxx 09 ?

Filed under: devoxx javafx jdk7 on Wednesday Aug 26, 2009

The Devoxx conference is something of a shapeshifter. One of the 'european JavaOnes', it grew out of the Belgian JUG, has undergone a number of name changes, and now has shifted up a month, starting this year on November 16th instead of its early December slot.

One thing has remained consistent though: its a well-attended conference with a lot of up to date and high quality technical content.

For anyone interested in JDK 7, or JavaFX you should hop online and get planning: many of the Sun engineers involved in those projects are already signed up to speak.

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Under the hood with Garbage First

Filed under: jdk7 on Tuesday Aug 25, 2009

There's an interesting article over at Dr Dobbs about the new Garbage First collector, scheduled for prime time in JDK 7, and currently available to try out as an optional collector in the Java SE 6 update releases. Published experiences with this new memory management technique for Java are rare, though some have had good results.

The article examines in some detail the algorithms used in this collector, and hints at how they achieve the mostly prescribable pause limits. For those of you who don't often lift up the hood of the car you're driving you may need to refresh your general background on garbage collectors, their different flavors and algorithms.

And for those of you just interested in how to make it work, the article has a nice section on the knobs and levers you can pull to tune it for your own applications.

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Deep Dive on JDK 7

Filed under: jdk7 on Friday Aug 21, 2009

The Janitor joined Ed Ort for a Deep Dive on JDK 7, check it out here. Really given how much is going into JDK 7, its perhaps more of a flyover and swoop, but, if you need to catch up with the plan, take a look.

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JavaFX: Widgets galore

Filed under: javafx on Thursday Aug 20, 2009

If you feel like publicizing your programming prowess and you missed the JavaFX developer challenge, you should take a look at the WidgetFX contest.

WidgetFX is a container for desktop widgets written in JavaFX and is itself written all in JavaFX. And is already filling up with a number of useful widgets. From the obligatory clocks, calendars, post-it notes, to news readers, mailers, bookmark holders and twitter clients.

Or you might just like to put them all on your desktop.

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