JavaOne, Day 3: In Which I Shamelessly Plug My App at the Pavilion

And now, the thrilling conclusion to my untimely JavaOne coverage…

The New World: JavaFX Technology-Based UI Controls

Finally! This standout session on the new controls offered in JavaFX 1.2 is exactly what I was waiting for. Delivered by most of the same team as the previous day’s unfortunate Extreme GUI Makeover, they launched right into showing the new Look and Feel, Caspian, citing Nimbus as having a dated look.

The new Look is really sharp — you could easily mistake it for a Flex app (which is a compliment).

The list of controls includes such UI staples such as Button, Checkbox, ToggleButton, Textbox, Slider, Scrollbar, Hyperlink, List, Progress Indicator, and even Charts.

Yep, charts are part of the core API — something Swing always had to defer to JFreeChart. This isn’t just one token bar chart either. Available types of charts include: bar (2d/23d), line, plot, pie (2d/3d), scatter, bubble, and area.

The more banal controls seem to have received a good amount of love by the team as well. They have several, subtle bits of polish that help make them feel like professional controls. For example:

• The text control has a “prompt text” attribute which shows up as gray initial text in the box (e.g. “Search” in a search box).
• The list widget allows for variable row height.
• The progress indicator in indeterminate mode is represented as a spinner.

It’s true that there is no Table/Tree widget, or even a Combo box, but the team was quick to say that another release was on the way “in about six months”.

Eventually long time Swing veteran, Amy Fowler, took the stage and went into the details about the new layout managers, including: Tile, Flow, HBox, VBox, Stack, and Panel. Of special interest (to me) was an offhanded comment she made along the lines of “the 2D, and eventually 3D scene graph”. Exciting. I love me my 3D.

I got the impression that I was one of the only JavaFX fanboys in the room, as there were epithets flying around to the effect of “How do you expect us to work without a ComboBox!?”, and “I can’t feed my family without a table widget!”

I’m willing to grant the JavaFX team the benefit of the doubt here. It’s possible that my expectations were simply just lowered by the previous two days’ sessions, which perhaps was part of the plan all along in order to make this session shine. But JavaFX was released just over half a year ago, so considering this, they’ve made some pretty impressive strides. So color me excited.

But enough about technical sessions. Let’s go to the Pavilion.

The Java Store had a corner of “Java Utopia” this year, where various members of the Team JavaFX were milling about ready to assist in your first chaperoned experience with the store. As mentioned previously, a JavaFX app that I authored, Music Explorer FX, was one of the inaugural apps in the store, so naturally, I wanted to hang out a bit and hear about people’s experiences with it.

If you’d like to try Music Explorer FX out for yourself, you’re free to sign up for the Java Store’s beta program (free registration), and then the application itself is, of course, free. Eventually the Java Store will be open to the public without the need to register, but as this may be a while yet, I’ll provide an easier way to download the application real soon now.

JavaOne Postmortem

The JavaOne t-shirts this year had the equation “Java = Opportunity” written on the front. As I stand in line to board the plane waiting for my Xanax to kick in, I can’t help but wonder if the word “Missed” additionally belongs after the equal sign.

JavaFX (and JavaOne in general) faces an uncertain future with the Oracle acquisition. This should have been JavaFX’s year at JavaOne to come into its own. Every JavaFX session should have been as good as the one I attended today, but instead I found the sessions plagued with two year old demos, confusing pairings (two Ajax guys defending JavaFX?), and abysmal performance ($200 for a JavaFX mobile device that will bring back the nostalgia of the AWT circa 1998). Speaking as someone who has devoted some of his professional self to this new language, I really do hope it can succeed in spite of itself.

Actually that’s a bit too poetic. Really what I’m thinking while waiting to board the plane is if I get out of line right now and go rent a car, and just drive straight through on I-80, I’ll be back in Chicago on Saturday with enough time to still see my daughter’s ballet recital.