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Archive for 2008
Better Discovery Through Visualization
December 29, 2008 11:39 PM
Paul Lamere has posted a demo of a new 3D interface that he’s been working on for exploring and discoverying new music. Be sure to click through and watch the YouTube video to behold some very impressive animations. Paul also notes that recommendations from Project Aura are on the way.
Groovy is like Gravy, except that it has the “Groove” in it
December 24, 2008 1:53 PM
My five year old daughter, Meredith, recently asked me what I was working on. “I’m just working on some Groovy stuff”, I responded. She then announced: “Groovy is like Gravy, except that it has the ‘Groove’ in it”.
Griffon: Grails-for-Swing
December 19, 2008 3:29 PM
What do you get your Swing developers with Grails Envy this holiday season? Consider getting them Griffon: the Grails-for-Swing framework. Griffon brings the Grails “convention over configuration” to the embattled Swing space. Among many other things Griffon takes all of the terribleness out of Java deployment. With but one command (and no coding) I can create a simple scaffolded Swing application deployed via webstart, applet, and as a standalone app. Note that’s all three: I don’t even need to choose my deployment method.
The Map vs. the Terrain (or DSLs as Documentation)
December 12, 2008 12:43 AM
In the late David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, several of the main characters participate in a grand scale “Scorched Earth” style turn-based artillery game on a set of tennis courts. The object for each player was to lob tennis balls across court to opposing player’s targets where the balls represent some sort of ballistic warhead complete with a damage radius.
JavaFX 1.0 to be Released Today (includes Bonus Op Ed)
December 4, 2008 9:25 AM
The maiden voyage of JavaFX is scheduled to begin today. There have been, what seems to me, a lot of nay-saying and grumbling on the Internet — a place usually known for its welcoming of new ideas with open minds and hearts — regarding the projected success (or failure) of JavaFX.
Java is Dead. Long Live Java.
December 1, 2008 10:04 PM
If conferences like JavaOne are a High School Pep Rally, then “No Fluff, Just Stuff” is skipping out on the rally, and smoking in the parking lot with the Cool Kids. While at the J1 keynote Rich Green envisions “Java on all the screens of your life”, at NFJS, Stuart Halloway declares without ceremony that “Java is dead”.
State of Swing
November 29, 2008 12:00 AM
Last week during my JavaFX talk, a lot of good questions and comments about Swing came up. Hot off of a Swing project, I thought that it might be useful to compile some of my thoughts on the subject. So herein lie some common Swing sentiments that I feel are out there and my thoughts on them:
NFJS Retrospective
November 25, 2008 11:08 PM
Here are some of the quick observations I noted during the “No Fluff, Just Stuff” conference this weekend: If you don’t own a Macbook Pro you are a caveman If you still work primarily in Java then you’re not even recognizable as a bipedal humanoid.
Brain Surgeons or Band Mates?
November 24, 2008 11:49 PM
As several of my colleagues have noted, a bunch of us attended the “No Fluff, Just Stuff” symposium this weekend in Chicago. It was absolutely a great experience, and I walked away with a multitude of thoughts that I will no doubt blog about in painstaking detail over the coming weeks. But for now, here’s a quickie:
JavaFX 1.0 Next Week
November 24, 2008 12:33 PM
I already mentioned in a previous post that the JavaFX 1.0 SDK is coming out December 2nd, but Jim Weaver puts it much better than I did. I gave a talk on JavaFX last week, and one of the questions was (something to the effect of) “how can we start using JavaFX in real projects?”. Jim answers this much better than I did in this “call to arms”:
Kurzweil Interview
November 19, 2008 10:52 AM
Silicon.com is running an interview with technology innovator, Ray Kurzweil. I thoroughly enjoyed Kurzweil’s books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near in which he draws out the curve of technology from the start of human history through the present day, and into the future.
3D Gaming Memory Lane
November 12, 2008 11:36 PM
In a recent post, Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror fame) muses about his Graphics Card addiction. It got me thinking about my own affinity for graphics cards long gone (mine is not an addiction since I can stop anytime I want to — I just don’t want to).
JavaFX Physics Demo
November 11, 2008 9:15 PM
In yet another fun JavaFX experiment, I hooked into the Phys2d physics library and created a little demo. This demo shows eggs falling down some alternating ramps at regular intervals. It is pictured below in action:
JavaFX 1.0 Release Date: December 2…?
November 10, 2008 12:14 PM
In an oddly subdued announcement on the Ain’t Your Dad’s Java podcast, it was revealed that JavaFX 1.0 will be released in about three weeks on December 2nd. Here’s a fun fact: If you look up the AYDJ podcast on iTunes, half of the episodes are listed as explicit. JavaFX: now 30% more vulgar than Flex!
JavaFX to Swing: A Help or Hinderance
November 7, 2008 1:43 PM
Frank Sommers has written an insightful post exploring the idea that JavaFX is actually hurting a more mature client-side Java by pulling development effort away from Swing. In some ways it seems that JavaFX is Sun’s “Big RIA Experiment”. If it pays off, it could bring new blood into client-side Java and ultimately drive more investment and interest in Swing’s direction.
A Java Developer’s Take on Flash
October 31, 2008 10:45 AM
Kevin Glass over at Coke and Code has been documenting his experiences working with Flash to write 2D games. Why should you care? Kevin is a Java Gaming advocate, and the author of the appropriately named 2D Java gaming library, Slick. Kevin has been creating Java games for years, and I know of no other one person who has been so persistent with his free time in this space. In fact, he is so good at pumping out 2D games that I wonder if maybe his domain name refers to the drug, and not the beverage.
SnappRadio FX Source Code
October 23, 2008 2:12 PM
Here’s the JavaFX source code for SnappRadio FX. JavaFX code is pretty readable, so you shouldn’t have much trouble understanding what’s going on even if you’re not familar with the syntax. Main.fx is a good place to start if you want to trace through. As always, with all of my FX code, it likely does not conform to Best Practices, and since it was a learning exercise, any number of conflicting ideas are embedded within. Having said all that, here’s a quick highlight of some language features that someone with a Java background might do a double take on.
More Fun with JavaFX: SnappRadio FX
October 20, 2008 10:28 PM
A while back Paul Lamere wrote a compelling music visualization experiment called SnappRadio. From the SnappRadio website: “The Sun Labs Snapp Radio is a mashup of Radio Paradise, last.fm and Flickr. When you listen to music from Radio Paradise or last.fm, Snapp Radio will collect images from Flickr that are related to the music you are listening to and display them as a slide show.”
Groovy Java SE Project Postmortem
October 16, 2008 10:18 PM
I recently finished up a 10 month project for the City of Chicago’s budget office. Below is a transcript of the project postmortem interview with me as conducted by my 4 year old daughter, Meredith.
Leaking Memory? Try Netbeans 6.5 (Beta)
October 12, 2008 11:06 PM
For the past ten months I’ve been working on a Java desktop application for Chicago’s budget office that essentially loads up the city’s seven billion dollar budget and format it into a nice 600+ page public document. Multiple copies of these 600 page “budget book drafts” can exist at once, and be loaded into the application at will.
JavaFX Breakout (Project Nile) Webstart Link
October 10, 2008 1:10 AM
By request, I’ve posted a Java Web Start enabled version of the JavaFX Illustrator Breakout app described in the previous post. The app requires at least Java 6 to run (and possibly even 1.6u10, but I’m not positive on that — but hey, Java 6u10 is out of beta, so why not grab it anyway?)
Breaking out with JavaFX Redux: An Exploration of Project Nile
October 7, 2008 9:10 PM
In a previous post on JavaFX, we explored some of the 2D animation and drawing features of the language by implementing a “Breakout” style playtest. In this post we now look at the integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (dubbed Project Nile) using the same banal playtest.
The Last Java Puzzler
September 30, 2008 10:49 PM
The Java Posse recorded their latest podcast from the JVM Language Summit. One of the surprising pieces of news, not at all related to the summit, was that Java Heavyweight, Neal Gafter, in what has become in some ways, the ultimate Java Puzzler, has left Google to work for Microsoft.
Hungry Fathers Block Party
September 25, 2008 10:14 PM
If you’re like me than you enjoy listening to the up and coming Folk-Rock band Hungry Fathers. If you are me, then you play Lead Guitar for Hungry Fathers! Either way, you might be interested to know that Hungry Fathers is playing at the North Park University Homecoming Block Party this Saturday, September 27th. The block party is at the corner of Kedzie and Carmen, and we go on at noon. Over 4,000 people are expected, and you too could contribute to that statistic.
ISMIR 2008
September 23, 2008 9:25 PM
Music Information Retrieval Research Pioneer and Honorary CityTech Friend, Paul Lamere, has been at ISMIR (The International Conferences on Music Information Retrieval and Related Activities) this past week and is aiming to set the record for most blog posts in the shortest amount of time.
Breaking Out with JavaFX
August 24, 2008 9:51 PM
For the first in a series of posts exploring the JavaFX (Script) language, I decided to write a simple clone of the classic game Break-Out. This little play test looks at the following aspects of the language:
JavaFX: The Best Thing to Happen to the Java Platform, or the Best Thing Ever?
August 14, 2008 10:38 PM
The JavaFX preview SDK was released not long ago, and it boasts some major changes since the early access release. JavaFX is Sun’s RIA platform juggernaut, set to compete with the likes of Adobe Flex and MS Silverlight and may even have a shot at dethroning OpenLaszlo.
Pie Master
August 4, 2008 9:49 PM
My wife and I have been playing Lord of the Rings Online for about seven months now. Lotro is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), which is a sub-genre of online game where the world is persistent and can generally accommodate thousands of players at once. Players create a character in the game based on one of the races of Middle Earth. The basic goal is to improve your character by gaining experience via completing quests and killing things. The MMO element means that you have the option of teaming up with other players to augment the experience.
JavaOne: A Retrospective
July 29, 2008 10:27 PM
JavaOne is an experiment in Social Behaviorism as much as it is a Technology Conference. The experiment this year seemed to be what to do with 10,000 geeks, nerds, and dorks in the 30 to 40 minutes between sessions. Answer: make them wait in line.
JavaOne Sessions Now Available
July 17, 2008 10:59 PM
Sun has recently released the media from the 2008 JavaOne sessions on the Sun Developer Network site. Using your (free) SDN login you can listen to many of the sessions as well as read the transcription and view the Power Point presentation. Here are some of the sessions that I found noteworthy back when I attended the conference in May:
Game Over, Man!
June 23, 2008 10:25 PM
I recently went to my local GameStop in an attempt to purchase the game: “Zach & Wiki” for the Wii to play with my 4 year old daughter. I enjoy going to GameStop despite it’s name which puts two words together that conjure up memories of all the times my original Nintendo crashed on me. They might as well be named “GameLockUp”, or “GameFreeze”.
Groovy Builders: A Pair Programming Experience
June 17, 2008 10:12 PM
So I’ve been meaning to write up a post on my experience with Groovy’s Builder support. Rather than actually do this though, I thought it would be more insightful to enclose the transcript from my latest Pair Programming session, which revolved around writing a custom Groovy Builder and integrating it into our application.
Groovy Pretending
June 8, 2008 8:09 PM
A Humorous Setup groovy source file: Uh, hi compiler, I need to invoke a method on an object — the thing is, I’m not totally sure that the object has this method. groovyc: Relax, man. No worries, I’ll just go ahead and generate some byte code for you.
Google Reject
June 5, 2008 1:24 AM
A while back I scored an in-person interview with Google, Inc. I prepared as best I could for it beforehand (by watching the “Interviewing at Google” video). I was intimidated and nervous for sure; here was the company that had transformed not only the landscape of the internet, but also the global economy.
Groovy Without Grails
June 4, 2008 12:44 AM
me: So I’ve integrated Groovy quite nicely into my Java project. coworker: It must be a Grails project. me: Nope! It’s a Swing desktop application. coworker: Oh sure, makes sense, you’re probably using the excellent Groovy SwingBuilder.
On Cloud Nine with Nimbus
June 1, 2008 10:22 PM
 Here’s a screen shot of the Swing application that I’m currently working on: It has a nice potpourri of the older established Swing and the younger, hipper, SwingX components. You’ve got your JTrees, JTables, JTabbedPanes, a JXEditorPane, and even a JProgressBar chugging away indeterminately in the lower-right corner. Thanks to the”system” Look & Feel, it will fool most users into thinking that it’s a native Windows XP application.
Sten Anderson
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