Jfokus is over, and it was a very positive experience, although with a booth, a brand new presentation and an article in the JayView magazine distributed to all attendees, it was also a bit draining. Thanks to everybody who saw our presentation (we’d love to hear what you thought about it) and/or stopped by our booth. We had a great time, and we hope you did too!
Author Archive for Martin Gunnarsson
Quick note: JayView is a free magazine published by JayWay, and in the latest issue (#20) there’s an article we’ve written about JavaFX, called “Swing Rocks – The last dance?“. The magazine will be handed out at JFokus, if you’re not going there, you can download it in PDF format on the JayView website any day now.
Right now we’re spending all free time preparing for our presentation at JFokus on wednesday, and it’s really coming together nicely. Like we’ve said before, this presentation (called JavaFX: Designer – Developer Workflow) is kind of a different from our previous ones. Using Photoshop, NetBeans and the tools from the JavaFX Production Suite, we’ll actually create a simple but good looking application from scratch during the presentation. Hopefully we’ll be able to show our audience how easy it is for designers and developers to collaborate on rich user interfaces using JavaFX and the JavaFX Production Suite, and what kind of results you can achieve in less than an hour. Live coding is always a bad idea, and we’re throwing in some live Photoshop wizardry as well, this should be exciting for all of us 
Just a quick note to let you know that we’ve been accepted as speakers at JFokus in january, with our presentation JavaFX – Designer Developer Workflow. We had a great time there last year, though we were struck by the weird timing bug we’ve been writing about before during our presentation. This year, our beloved employer Epsilon is an official conference partner, and we’re looking forward to see you in our booth, where you can win some sweet prizes by participating in our robot battle programming competition!
We just found out we’ve been accepted as speakers at Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010. We’ve heard a lot of good things about the conference, so we’re really looking forward to going there. We actually got two presentations accepted, the first one, called JavaFX – Designer Developer Workflow, is kind of a different introduction to JavaFX. It doesn’t focus on the actual JavaFX script language, but on how designers and developers can work together with a JavaFX project. In the second presentation, called Making data look good using Java, JavaFX and Groovy, we’ll show off our latest project, codenamed Knut. We’ll demonstrate the application, talk about how we developed some of its features, and share some valuable lessons learned.
Hats off to the SDC crew, who have (almost) finished a detailed conference schedule four months before the conference!
Now it’s only one day left until we get to get up ridiculously early, stand in way too many lines at various airport, and hopefully end up safe in San Francisco. I’m not that excited about the flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco, flights shouldn’t have to take a two-digit number of hours. I’ve bought a big battery for my little netbook, but I really hope to sleep through as much of the flight as possible. We aren’t super prepared for our talk yet, but we have some time to rehearse in San Francisco, and we’re both pretty confident that we’ll be ready well in time for thursday.
The last few days we’ve fixed the problem that prevented Feedjii from running on OS X, but our solution isn’t perfect yet. As we’ll probably be busy preparing for our talk in San Francisco, I wouldn’t count on a new beta release until we’re back home again. Feel free to drop us an e-mail if you’re going to JavaOne and feel like meeting up. I’m sure we’ll have time for a beer or two, despite our busy schedule
A lot of people have let us know that Feedjii doesn’t seem to play well with OS X. This is of course a shame, especially since I’m a long time mac-user. The thing most people seem to have problems with is the class com.sun.awt.AWTUtilities is missing. I could be wrong, but I believe this class was introduced in Java 6 update 10, and with the latest official Java version from Apple, I think all we’re getting is Java 6 update 7. In Feedjii, this class is used to create the (custom) rounded corners of the application window, and we should clearly have some kind of fallback mechanism here.
The somewhat embarrassing reason we didn’t test this ourselves is that I was totally convinced I couldn’t run Java 6 on my iMac. As far as I know, it’s only available for 64-bit Intel processors, and I simply didn’t think my Core 2 Duo was one of them. When I checked this morning, I was surprised to see that I actually had Java 6 installed, so I guess I was simply wrong. I hope we can add a nice workaround for this problem, and ultimately also get our application running on Java 5. Obviously without some of the bling-bling, but running nonetheless.
Thanks for your patience!
Our JavaOne presentation has now been assigned to a time slot in the conference schedule. Here are the details:
ID#: TS-5072
Title: Swing Rocks: A Tribute to Filthy-Rich Clients
Date: 04-JUN-09
Time: 09:30 AM-10:30 AM
Room: Hall E 135
Please note that the room assignment isn’t final, it might change based on the number of attendees who pre-roll. We really hope to see you there!
Yup, it’s true, our presentation got accepted for JavaOne, so in a few short months we’re going to San Francisco! We’re thrilled about this, and we will spend the spring fine tuning Feedjii and our presentation. I’m personally most concerned about the language (english that is, not Java), my english used to be pretty good, but now it’s a bit rusty. I’m thinking about creative ways to practice, but I guess nothing beats meeting actual native speakers. Our presentation isn’t scheduled yet, but we’ll let you know about the time and date as soon as we know it. For now, all I can say that if you’re in San Francisco between the 1st and 5th of june, you know where to find us!
We’ll probably write a lot about our preparations here, and now you can follow us on Twitter as well. Have a nice weekend!
Our presentation at JFokus was haunted by some technical problems, which embarassingly enough caused very poor performance in Feedjii. Ouch! Despite this, we got very positive feedback, and we’re looking forward to having a pint and discussing Java GUI’s more in-depth at the conference pub tonight. For now, we’re just relaxing and enjoying the other speakers’ presentations.
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