I was lucky to be present 🙂

Conference Day 1 : Wednesday December 12th

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Conf+Day+1

We focused on the Swing related sessions.

JavaFX by Jim Weaver

Very interesting speaker. Had the original idea to throw paper airplanes (of some value, I think free ebook) to people asking good questions.

Was my first real contact with java fx code. Looks like an easy syntax. Still for making a complete and complex gui I’m afraid you still end up with pages and pages of code. Anyway less than you would with swing.

He suggested we should play with the compiled version and have a look towards his blog for getting started information and examples.

The Elepehant is through the door example references that this project has left most of the work behind and is now wrapping up to get a stable production release.

Showed examples of syntaxt in general, binding, … (need my notes to complete this)

sources:

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/JavaFX (session)
http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Jim+Weaver (speaker)
https://openjfx.dev.java.net/ (official project homepage)
http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/ (blog speaker)

Filthy Makeover by Chet Haase

Showed us a lot of relatively simply gui iprovements. Real life examples of gui’s morphing from the standard grey ones towards fancy and therefore attractive user interfaces. The book is on my wishlist now.

Some of the topics (need my notes again)

* shadows
* blur
* gradients
* glass panels

sources:

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Filthy+Makeover (session)
http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Chet+Haase (speaker)
http://filthyrichclients.org/ (book)

Web 2.0 Collaboration and Social Networking by Thomas Schaeck

This speaker was less interesting. End up showing a bunch of new web 2.0 tools for the lotus platform. Communities, Media Library, Blogs, Profiles, … nothing really new. But most of all this was more like a commercial in conference disguise.

sources:

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Web+2.0+Collaboration+and+Social+Networking (session)
http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Thomas+Schaeck (speaker)

Practical JRuby on Rails by Ola Bini and Charles Oliver Nutter

I had experience with Ruby on Rails (RoR) for profiling before and was very impressed back then. This session was not that new to me, the new part was the interaction with java. Which is interesting. Still all looked to have slow startup times… no surprises there :). Programmers also found some bugs while demonstration. Still this technology is impressive and very nice to play with. For prototyping I believe in this project.

The testing possibilities of this framework combined with the java code loading looked promising. Having nice mocking abilities, dynamic code loading and ease of specifications added to Java. Definitely something I wil get into.

sources:

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Practical+JRuby+on+Rails (session)
http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Ola+Bini (speakers)
http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Charles+Oliver+Nutter (speakers)
http://jruby.codehaus.org/ (official project homepage)

blueMarine by Fabrizio Giudici

blueMarine is a good looking image organizer. It is designed by and for photographer(s).

Allthough I couldn’t always follow into detail this was an interesting session. The message I get is that swing is no framework but a great base for frameworks. We should look beyond swing, not to different approache but towards frameworks that built on swing. The most promising example libraries were swinglabs for general gui’s, and netbeans rcp for more advanced, complex gui’s. The last provides plugin funtcionality etc.

The programmer also showed some interesting options of his program (like the light panel and binding pictures towards a gps track) that are not available yet.

sources:

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/blueMarine (session)
http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Fabrizio+Giudici (speaker)
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/ (project homepage) http://swinglabs.org/ (swinglabs)
http://platform.netbeans.org/ (netbeans rcp)

recorded presentations : http://www.parleys.com/display/PARLEYS/Home