The Planetarium

You almost certainly heard that you can drag an applet out of its web page, so long as the version of Java running it is current enough.

But did you know that you can change the applet as it's being dragged out, or put back in ? That you can change the appearance of the applet according to whether the version of Java running it supports the draggable feature ? That you don't have to have the users hold down the alt key to drag it out ?

If you didn't, check out this tech tip from Javafx.com.

What's interesting about this picture of the JavaFX Flickr photo app ? Ya, its been dragged out of the web page. No big deal, but previously only possible on Windows.

What's interesting about it is was dragged it out of Safari 4 beta on the Planetarium's resident Mac ! No dual boot/virtualization tricks, honest.

If you want to check out the new browser Java plugin running on MAC its a 3 step program: get Safari 4 beta if you don't already have it, then get the latest Java update from Apple. The latter is a developer release (so far !), so you'll need to login to get it. Then make sure you set your Java Preferences to 1.6, and have applets use their own process.

And speaking of exciting beta software, you might want to check out NetBeans 6.7. (Hello, I'm a NetBean !) This release, amongst other things, hooks developers up directly within the IDE to project hosting/collaboration site Kenai, and Bugzilla.

The growing chorus (amongst a cacophony) of very usable Twitter clients that use Twitter's REST API and run on the JVM, show to great effect that the Java runtime is a lovely place for a RIA app to perch.

Like Greet (start) which is build on the Griffon framework. Griffon uses the Groovy language and Swing components, and just hatched its 0.1 release.

Or the Simple Twitter Client, (start), built with the Scala language and Swing components wrapped in the Scala Swing package, as you can see here.

Or any of the JavaFX Twitter clients, Tweetbox (start) or TwitterFX, (start) built with the scene graph and JavaFX Script.

No news to those of you at last year's JavaOne ScriptBowl, but nice illustrations of why, what some may consider dull plumbing: tweaking the bytecode, modularizing the JDK, and rewriting the browser plugin benefits all RIA apps that run there, whatever their language: they run faster, start quicker, and integrate better into web pages (or pull out too).

One of the most popular features of the recent Java SE 6u10/11 releases was the new browser plugin architecture. Java Applets (or JavaFX,  JRuby, Groovy...applets) get their own VM, external to the browser process in which to execute. Meaning that applets have a more independent existence: they can choose their own VM parameters, and live beyond the lifetime of the web page they came from. Maybe that's why 78 million people downloaded it in December ?

A browser plugin does not have to be part of every Java SE implementation because the Java SE platform is not required to run in browsers. Nevertheless, as Joe announces, the team has decided to make the code part of OpenJDK so that the new features get supported in Linux and Mac too.

And, other good news about Java SE is that Jonathan Giles has signed up to take over Kirill's Swing Links of the Week. Definitely one to track for GUI programmers.