Greetings again from JavaPolis 2007 (AKA Europe's JavaOne). Days 2 and 3 of the conference (Tuesday, December 11 and Wednesday, December 12) have had lots of activity and a couple of announcements surrounding JavaFX:
- On Tuesday, I presented a three hour "university" session entitled JavaFX in Action. To deliver the presentation, instead of creating presentation slides, I created a presentation engine in JavaFX Script that looks just like the slide templates required for the conference. This allowed me to showcase some of the JavaFX graphics and animation capabilities, and to do most of the demonstrations within the context of the slides themselves. For fun, and audience involvement, I gave away some JavaFX Script eBook downloads to audience members that asked good questions. I made paper airplanes out of the download authorization codes so that I could throw them to audience members. When this session is posted online on the JavaPolis site, I'll give you a heads-up in case you want to see it.
- Speaking of animation and graphics, Sun announced Project Scene Graph, which is an API library that provides an abstraction for some very impressive graphics capability. This is the graphics library that JavaFX Script uses behind its declarative graphics code, e.g. Rect {...}, but Java programs can use it as well. It is open source now, under the GPL license. Joshua Marinacci has a great article in his weblog about Scene Graph.
- Another JavaFX related announcement is the NetBeans 6.0 final release. Its JavaFX plug-in has some very nice features, and James Gosling mentioned in the keynote session on Wednesday that NetBeans has many improvements such as context-aware code completion and UI/editor enhancements.
- Also at the Wednesday keynote, James Gosling emphasized that Sun is prototyping JavaFX UI designer tools targeted at graphics designers as well as application developers. One possible platform for this tool is NetBeans, but this hasn't been decided.
- Angela Caicedo (a Sun Java "Evangelist" and JavaFX Script fanatic like myself) presented a couple of JavaFX Script applications that she'd developed. One of them was a very nice looking and usable Twitter front end, and the other was a touchscreen based picture organizer and viewer.
- James Gosling also discussed JavaFX Mobile a bit, mentioning that it will be a "complete mobile phone stack" that will make use of JavaFX Script (presumably the compiled version) to provide application UIs.
- James also discussed Java SE 6 Update N, and some of its current and planned features, including a new deployment toolkit, a new installer with a Java Kernel, and a new browser plug-in that will support JavaFX Script running in a browser. He mentioned that a JavaFX program, as well as an applet, will have the ability to be dragged out of the browser an into its own window.
- I gave an abbreviated (one hour) presentation on Wednesday entitled JavaFX Script, drawing from some of Tuesday's longer presentation and adding some material that I've put in this LearnJavaFX weblog. I had received feedback during the Tuesday presentation that the audience wanted to see more code and briefer demos, so I took that advice for this presentation.
- While I was watching the last session of the day, I sat next to a couple of nice people that asked me if I had any more airplanes (with JavaFX Script eBook download codes). I gave each of them one, and noticed later that evening that one of them (Elise Huard) had written a nice blog post about it, which I appreciated.
I also appreciated the very nice JavaFX Script book review that Robert Eckstein of Sun wrote and then linked from the java.sun.com home page. Robert also has a nice video blog on JavaFX Script that you'll want to check out!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
JavaFX Script: Dynamic Java Scripting for Rich Internet/Client-side Applications
eBook (PDF) download immediately available at the book's Apress site
Comments