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This Week: Jfokus 2012

Posted by editor on February 12, 2012 at 2:51 PM EST

Among the conferences I hope to attend some day is Jfokus, held annually in Stockholm, Sweden. In my view, Jfokus exemplifies an emerging trend where Java-centric conferences that originally started out as smaller, regional events ultimately attain international stature. It seems to me that conferences like Jfokus are increasingly taking on a greater role in helping developers network, exchange ideas, and learn more about the latest advances in Java technologies -- unlike in the past when JavaOne was the most important Java event by far.

Jfokus 2012 happens this week, Monday through Wednesday.

This is the sixth Jfokus. The first Jfokus in 2007 attracted more than 450 developers, virtually all from Sweden. The following year, the conference expanded to two days, and became more of an international affair, with 650 developers from Sweden, several other European countries, and even India, being in attendance. The conference continued to grow, moving to a larger venue starting in 2009.

This year's speakers roster includes many prominent Swedish developers, along with quite a few people from other countries. For example, Google's David Chandler will be presenting on the new Dart language; Markus Eisele, from Germany, will be presenting "Java 7 - State of the Enterprise"; Oracle's Arun Gupta will have several Java EE related presentations; Oracle's Michael Heinrichs will present "JavaFX 2.0 from a developer's perspective"; Fabiane Bizinella Nardon, of RBS in Brazil (and the Java.net Java Tools Community), will talk about "Zero Downtime Continuous Deployment of Java Web Applications"; Oracle's Dalibor Topic will talk about the OpenJDK... That just scratches the surface, really.

Monday is devoted to tutorials, with a 3.5 hour morning session and a 3.5 hour afternoon session (five different tutorials happening simultaneously). Tuesday opens with a keynote address, "Enterprise Java in 2012 and Beyond," presented by Juergen Hoeller of SpringSource. The remainder of the day consists of 50-minute sessions, followed by BOFs in the evening. Wednesday's schedule includes additional 50-minute sessions, followed by a closing keynote, "Cool Code," presented by Curbranlan's Kevlin Henney.

You can follow Jfokus 2012 on Twitter (@Jfokus), on Facebook (Jfokus), or at the Jfokus conference site.

Update: Mattias Karlsson (@matkar) contacted me on Twitter with additional information about Jfokus: "Jfokus is a major international conference! 1450 visitors 2012." That, indeed, is a lot of growth in just five years since the first Jfokus in 2007. Mattias also points us to the video below, which gives us a bit of the feeling of what Jfokus 2011 was like:

Now I really wish I could be at Jfokus 2012!

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, several people have posted new java.net blogs:

Poll

Our current Java.net poll asks Under JCP 2.8, EC members lose their voting rights if they miss two consecutive meetings. Your view on this?. Voting will be open until Friday, February 17.

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest Java.net Spotlight is Tori Wieldt's Wanted: Java Code Brainteasers:

Each issue of Java Magazine includes a "Fix Me" page that presents a problem that challenges a Java developer's coding skills. The Java Magazine team is seeking Java Code Brainteasers for future issues. Here's a chance for you to contribute to Java Magazine!

Previously, we featured Javalobby's new poll, Have You Adopted Java 7 Yet?:

Java 7 has been available for a while now, and according statistics that Jelastic ran, it's market share is growing, albeit slowly. The article states that Java 7 accounts for 17% of the market while Java 6 still holds 83%. With Java still holding it's own on the latest TIOBE index, there's no doubt that it's not losing it's appeal to developers and corporations...

Prior to that, we spotlighted Johan Vos' DaliCore on java.net:

After years of development, refactoring, brainstorms, projects, fun, more refactoring,... we open-sourced the DaliCore code. DaliCore creates the core for the social networking applications that we developed with LodgON over the past years. Some code and documentation is now available...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of Java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

 
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Poll Result: Most Java/JVM Developers Expect a Profitable 2012; Others Agree

Posted by editor on February 6, 2012 at 4:34 PM EST

In the most recently completed Java.net poll, the Java/JVM developers who chose to participate generally anticipate stable or increased job opportunities in 2012. A total of 373 votes were cast, with the following results:

In 2012, job opportunities for Java/JVM developers will...

  • 19% (72 votes) - Expand rapidly
  • 25% (92 votes) - Increase moderately
  • 23% (86 votes) - Remain stable
  • 9% (33 votes) - Decline
  • 17% (65 votes) - I don't know
  • 7% (25 votes) - Other

So, 2/3 of the voters believe job opportunities will remain stable or increase, while only 9% expect opportunities to decline. That's a level of optimism that I don't think we've seen in a while.

For example, looking back to our March 2010 poll that asked "Is the software engineering job market improving?", less than half of the voters selected one of the positive responses. Of course, the polls asked different questions, so it's a little complex trying to draw conclusions. Still, that poll was posted at a time when almost everyone had witnessed declining opportunities in the recent past. More than a quarter of the voters were still awaiting 'the promised "recovery"' or saw the situation continuing to worsen.

I have seen various articles that suggest a boom (or at least a fairly strong upward tide) is underway for software engineers. For example, there was the Dice.com (US) survey that I blogged about a month ago where United States recruiters indicated that finding "Java/J2EE Developers" is their top priority for 2012.

What's happening in the mobile apps arena is also pretty amazing. On April 15, 2011, the Wall Street Journal had an article titled "App Talent Pool Is Shallow: Companies Scramble for Engineers Who Can Write Software for Smartphones." (I have the clipping, but can't find an online link.)

Then there are these recent interesting articles at Forbes.com:

  • Venkatesh Rao, 5 December 2011 - The Rise of Developeronomics (the author cites software developers as being the one "safe haven" that exists today for investors); and
  • Tomio Geron, 21 December 2011 - Just How Much Are Engineers In Demand? Very Much So (which starts with: "As any technology executive in Silicon Valley could tell you, hiring engineers is one of their toughest tasks these days.")

Here's a demonstrative figure from Tomio's article:

This all says to me that if you're good at what you do, today can indeed be a very good time for advancing your career in software engineering. It also suggests that adding new skills that are highly in demand can significantly increase your value in the marketplace.

So, please, keep working, learning, practicing, and advancing, people!

New poll: Lost JCP EC voting rights

Our new Java.net poll asks Under JCP 2.8, EC members lose their voting rights if they miss two consecutive meetings. Your view on this?. Voting will be open until Friday, February 17.

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is the upcoming Java Virtual Developer Day:

Coming soon (Feb 14 in the Americas, Feb 28 in Europe/Russia/Africa): Java Virtual Developer Day, a half-day virtual mini-conference of technical sessions and hands-on labs, covering Java SE 7, JDK 7, JavaFX 2.0. Register now!

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

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Night Dreams about NetBeans 7.1, etc.; Day Work Configuring CentOS Linux for JavaFX 2.1

Posted by editor on February 4, 2012 at 1:28 PM EST

Last night I dreamed seemingly all night about NetBeans 7.1, the JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview, the JDK 6 and JDK 7 installations on my CentOS Linux system, Java threads, the JDK 7 Fork/Join framework, closures... and probably a few more things were in there too. That kind of thing happens to me sometimes after a late night of programming or development-related brainstorming.

Now, if these dreams happen when I have looming deadline, I usually consider it a nightmare -- because I'll often "work" all night "solving" some problem that doesn't exist in my day world. But I'm hoping last night's dreams will ultimately prove to have been at least a little bit productive. There were plenty of curious ideas mixed in there. I'll find out if any of it's useful over the next several days...

Day work: JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview on Linux

It's daytime now, so I'll get down to some practical work. First, there's some good news for developers who want to try out JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview on Linux: Linux Release Notes and installation instructions are now available (that wasn't the case when I wrote my Getting Started (Very Preliminarily)... blog post a couple weeks ago). Also, the 2.1 Developer Preview is has advanced to build b11 (I originally downloaded build b9).

The instructions for JavaFX 2.1 on Linux identify the following system requirements:

  • Ubuntu Linux 10.4 or higher (32 or 64 bit)
  • JDK 6 update 26 or higher
  • gtk2 2.18+
  • libavcodec (for media)

I'm running CentOS 5.5, not Ubuntu; my current JDK 6 is prior to update 26; and rpm -q gtk2 tells me that I have gtk2 Version 2.10.4-20.el5. Not the perfect starting point... But, my guess is that likely I'll be able to get a proper configuration in place.

The latest GTK2 that's available via yum for CentOS 5.5 is still in the Version 2.10 sequence. So, I downloaded the last stable GTK2 (Version 2.24.9), and tried installing it. The result of ./configure was a bunch of missing dependencies (too old a version of GLib, and missing atk, pango, cairo, and gdk-pixbuf-2.0). Using yum to see what prepackaged versions of these are available for my CentOS system, I found that in all cases the available packages predate the required versions.

Stepping back to GTK+ 2.18 would help some, but still the dependencies could not be met by simply using the yum package manager.

So, it's a dilemma. I'd like to try out the JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview on my CentOS system, but there's a pretty big gulf between the CentOS 5.5 packages and what's required for JavaFX 2.1. Attempting big jumps in package versions can break a stable Linux system, in my experience. And the idea of upgrading to a newer operating system isn't all that appealing (that means downtime, and I do have development deadlines to meet). In addition, there are other things I'd like to be working on as well (such as experimenting with the performance differences between various strategies for efficiently utilizing multicore computers -- all that non-JavaFX stuff I was dreaming about last night).

I'll have to think about this for a while... Or, perhaps another night of Java-centric dreaming will provide a solution!

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, several people have posted new java.net blogs:

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks Under JCP 2.8, EC members lose their voting rights if they miss two consecutive meetings. Your view on this?. Voting will be open until Friday, February 17.

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Heather Van Cura's JCP 2.8 Spec Lead Materials & Adopt-a-JSR update:

Following the upgrade to the JCP 2.8 Program, the Program Office has made available the following materials for Spec Leads on the Multimedia page of jcp.org: -Transparency (December 2011 call) -JCP 2.8 Overview (October 2011 call)...

Previously, we featured Jasper Potts' Curve fitting and styling AreaChart:

I was experimenting today with extending AreaChart to do curve fitting for some example code I was hacking on. It is also a example of what can be done with styling JavaFX charts with CSS. Here is the result...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

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JCP's Evolution into Openness Continues: Lost Voting Rights and JSR 355

Posted by editor on January 29, 2012 at 6:20 PM EST

I was surprised to read the JCP Program Office's recent announcement that AT&T, Samsung, and SK Telecom have all lost their Executive Committee (EC) voting rights. The reason? Well, the JCP EC meeting held earlier this month was the second held under the new JCP 2.8 EC Standing Rules. Under those rules, if an Executive Committee member misses two consecutive meetings, they lose their voting privileges. AT&T, Samsung, and SK Telecom missed the last two EC meetings, so they'll have no voting rights for a while (see their names highlighted in RED on the current JCP minutes page).

To me, this is refreshing. It shows that, under the JCP 2.8 rules, membership on a JCP Executive Committee isn't just a title for a company (or individual) to highlight on their web site or resume. A responsibility is entailed. If you're not going to fulfill your obligation to attend the meetings, then you won't have a say in what happens next.

Also, it seems to me that an EC member's attendance record will now matter when the next EC election comes up. That's a very good thing too, I think. If you're on the EC, attend the meetings -- or step aside, and let someone who genuinely wants to participate take your place.

So, if you miss two consecutive meetings, you lose your voting rights (along with your right to make or second a motion). If you miss five consecutive meetings, or if you miss 2/3 of all the meetings that take place in any 12-month period (EC meetings typically occur on a monthly basis), you are booted off the Executive Committee entirely (regardless of how major you are in the marketplace, or how famous you may be as an individual).

Now, if after you lose your voting rights, you decide you want to take your EC membership seriously, you can regain your voting privileges: by attending two consecutive upcoming meetings. I hope AT&T, Samsung, and SK Telecom will all decide to do that. There are very good reasons why JCP members voted them into their Executive Committee seats. It's time for them to fulfill the roles they were elected to fulfill.

JSR 355: JCP.Next, Part 2

The JCP Program Office also announced Another JCP.Next JSR submitted. This is JSR 355: JCP Executive Committee Merge. In her post about the new submission, the JCP's Heather Vancura-Chilson summarizes the main thrust of the JSR as follows:

this JSR proposes to make changes to the JCP's Process Document and the Executive Committee's Standing Rules with the goal of merging the two Executive Committees into one and reducing the total number of Executive Committee members from the current total of 32. The existing two-to-one ratio of ratified to elected seats will be maintained. On the merged EC neither Oracle nor any other member may hold more than one seat.

At JavaOne, we saw a vision of an across-the-board synchronization of the Java platform presented, wherein all facets of the Java platform, from editions for the smallest devices to Java EE preparing for the emergence of data centers in the cloud, will be driven toward consistency. Loose strands will be brought back toward the core Java platform. If this is indeed the vision, indeed the plan, then it makes a lot of sense to have only a single Java Community Process Executive Committee.

JSR 355 is yet another excellent move for the JCP, in my view. And the fact that the JCP 2.8 rules clearly delineate the responsibility of members to take their positions seriously -- that's great for Java and the Java/JVM developer community as well. Nice work, JCP!

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, Sanjay Dasgupta posted an interesting new java.net blog:

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks for your response to In 2012, job opportunities for Java/JVM developers will.... Voting will be open until Friday, February 3.

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Tori Wieldt's JUG Leaders Conference:

The annual International Oracle User Group (IOUC) Leader's Conference was held this week in at Oracle in Redwood Shores, California. The conference provides three days of learning, networking, sharing, and collaboration about user groups. It also fosters better communication between user group leaders...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

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Getting Started (Very Preliminarily) with JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview on Linux

Posted by editor on January 24, 2012 at 7:21 PM EST

Yesterday, Jonathan Giles announced that the JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview, build 09, is available for Windows, Mac and Linux! Jonathan says, "From here on out we'll be putting out developer preview builds for all three platforms." That this is news that a lot of people have been long awaiting is shown by the immediate response (seven comments) to Jonathan's brief (three sentences) announcement.

I've been waiting for this myself, since I'm starting work on a new open source project (related to efficient use of multicore processors in desktop applications), and I've wanted to be able to use JavaFX as a front end for my demos (or, at least offer it as an option). My preferred platform is Linux (though I also have an old MacBook and a Windows machine). My primary development machine runs CentOS 5.5 (equivalent to RedHat Enterprise Linux, but with no non-free packages).

So, let's get started!

Before you download JavaFX 2.1 build b09, you must accept the OTN License Agreement (I looked for a link to the license, just for reference, but didn't immediately find it). Also, I had to log in to my Oracle account in order to actually receive the download.

The Mac OS X and Linux downloads are in zip format. Once I'd logged in, I was able to save the file, javafx_sdk-2_1_0-beta-b09-linux-i586-17_jan_2012.zip, onto my system. At present, there isn't a link that provides installation instructions for the Linux edition. An 


unzip javafx_sdk-2_1_0-beta-b09-linux-i586-17_jan_2012.zip

creates a javafx-sdk2.1.0-beta directory. Diving into that, you'll see COPYRIGHT.html, README.html, THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME.txt, and directories bin, docs, rt, and tools. README.html sends you to Oracle's JavaSE README page, which includes README's for the JavaFX 2.0 runtime and SDK. So, that's not your path to installing JavaFX 2.1 on Linux.

Poking around a bit more, it suddenly dawned on me that maybe the unzip operation itself was the install. Aside from PATH settings, of course (since I did the unzip in a somewhat arbitrary location).

The docs subdirectory consists of documentation of the API itself. The bin subdirectory contains the javafxpackager, a shell script internally documented as being the "JavaFX Packager tool execution script for Linux/Solaris/OS X."

It's interesting that OS X is lumped in with Linux and Solaris, right? So, I clicked the Mac OS X installation instructions and release notes link, which brings you to a page titled "JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview for Mac OS X Release Notes." This page includes a link to instructions for setting up NetBeans with JavaFX 2.0 -- which is how I was planning on getting started anyway. It also talks about the JavaFX Samples available on the downloads page; but, again, there is no link for "Linux" in that section of the page.

The next step in my investigation will be to see if I can get any of the simple Mac OS samples work under Linux. Whether that works out or not, the step after that will be to see if I can make my own first very simple JavaFX app that runs on CentOS Linux.

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, several people have posted interesting new java.net blogs:

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks for your response to In 2012, job opportunities for Java/JVM developers will.... Voting will be open until Friday, February 3.

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Markus Eisele's The Heroes of Java: Trisha Gee:

The 11th part of my "Heroes of Java" interview series. Thanks for following it! Stay tuned for the next parts! Trisha is a developer at LMAX, the London Multi Asset eXchange. She's been working in financial markets for the last 5 years or so...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

Related Topics >>
Blog Links >>

Poll Result: NetBeans Users Quickly Adopt Version 7.1

Posted by editor on January 21, 2012 at 4:08 PM EST

The latest Java.net poll suggests that NetBeans users have been quick in their adoption of the NetBeans IDE 7.1 Release. A total of 802 votes were cast in the poll, with the following results:

How soon do you plan to start using the just-released NetBeans 7.1?

  • 50% (405 votes) - I'm already using it
  • 8% (65 votes) - Within the next month
  • 6% (45 votes) - I'll upgrade eventually
  • 2% (19 votes) - I'm staying with my current NetBeans version
  • 19% (152 votes) - Never, since I don't use NetBeans
  • 7% (56 votes) - I don't know
  • 7% (60 votes) - Other

If you eliminate the 19% who are not NetBeans users (and don't intend to become NetBeans users), the "already using it" percentage rises above 62% (405 out of 650). So, about 5/8 of NetBeans users (or potential NetBeans users -- some of these may have answered "I don't know" or "Other") who participated in the poll are already using the NetBeans 7.1 release. Meanwhile, another 17% plan to upgrade within the next month, or eventually.

So, if the poll is representative of the broader NetBeans user community, all prior versions of NetBeans will soon be used by only a small fraction of all NetBeans users. Of course, this isn't a scientific poll...

It's clearly a very good thing for a community based project when the user community quickly adopts the latest major release. That facilitates communication from the community on what improvements and enhancements are most important for upcoming releases -- helping the development team prioritize the possibilities and set its roadmap so that it responds to the community's needs.

If you haven't yet decided on whether you'd like to move to NetBeans IDE 7.1, there are tutorials and videos available to help you decide, or get started.

New poll: 2012 job outlook for Java/JVM developers

Our new poll asks for your response to In 2012, job opportunities for Java/JVM developers will.... Voting will be open until Friday, February 3.

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, Otávio Santana has posted a new java.net blog:

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Tori Wieldt's Java Virtual Developer Days in February:

Get the latest information about Java without leaving your desk! The Oracle Technology Network is sponsoring free virtual developer days, where you watch technical sessions and participate in hands-on-labs supported by live, moderated chats with Oracle's technical staff. At these FREE online events you will learn...

Prior to that, we featured Tori's Save the Dates: JavaOne Russia and JavaOne India:

JavaOne Russia and JavaOne India are regional events that allow learning about all aspects of Java--from better programing with the new features of Java SE 7 to using other languages on the JVM. Learn from the experts how to use Java better, about the Java roadmap, and how to choose and use tools in the Java ecosystem for your development work...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

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Java.net Java User Groups Community: On the March!

Posted by editor on January 17, 2012 at 7:52 PM EST

Michael Huettermann has been hard at work recently, updating the Java.net Java User Groups community pages. This past Friday, he announced "A further bunch of JUG web pages updated":

After I've intensively updated a bunch of JUG related web pages on java.net, especially those that can be reached from the new/updated "JUG Resources" block on our main entry page, we now have a dramatically reduced number of open issues and a better user experience...

If you're involved in a Java User Group and you've not recently visited or participated in the happenings in the Java.net JUGs Community, now is a very good time to consider getting involved again.

There's a lot happening involving Java User Groups today. We see new JUGs springing up across the world, for example the Algeria Java User Group, which held its third meeting on Monday. Oracle has been active in supporting JUGs, sending prominent people to JUG meetings, and supporting JUG activities through events like last year's Java 7 Community Celebrations.

On the Java.net JUGs Community main page you can find a Java User Group in your area using the JUG Profile Map:

Or, by viewing an alphabetical listing worldwide Java User Groups. Or, you can use the search box to try to find a JUG.

The page also includes recent JUG news, and JUG related tweets (to create one, tag your tweet with #javajug or #javausergroups).

The recent focus of Michael's efforts has been on the pages that are linked to in the "JUG Resources" column on the left. These pages include:

As you can see, there's a lot available for Java User Groups on Java.net. If you haven't participated previously (or not lately), now is an excellent time to get involved!

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, Otavio Santana posted a new java.net blog:

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks How soon do you plan to start using the just-released NetBeans 7.1?. Voting will be open until this Friday, January 20.

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Toni Epple's NetBeans IDE 7.1 Review: JavaFX support:

Last year, with the release of version 2.0, JavaFX finally started to gain attention at the big conferences and there seemed for the first time to be a shift in developer perception now that Oracle addressed the issues that kept Java developers from using this new UI technology. There's the following issues that have now been resolved...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

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New Java.net Article Describes PanelMatic (a Library for Swing Developers)

Posted by editor on January 14, 2012 at 7:12 PM EST

We've just published Michael Bar-Sinai's new article "PanelMatic 101". The article introduces PanelMatic, an open source project that provides Swing developers with methods to easily construct common user interface panels. Michael introduces PanelMatic by expressing the problem it was developed to solve:

Every Swing developer knows this feeling: you've got the design of a UI panel. It's the 'right' design. It 'works'. It's what the user would expect. Hell, it's even what you would expect had you been the user. But it is going to be an awful lotta coding to lay it out in Swing - even before you take into consideration issue like panel re-sizing and localization.

Figure 1 in the article illustrates the process from handwritten design, through PanelMatic coding, to the final result:


Figure 1. Panel layout: Sketch, PanelMatic code, GUI panel

That's a pretty snazzy result for such a small amount of code. How is it possible?

Panels are built top-to-bottom (or, more precisely, on the page axis). There is an intuitive connection between the way the code looks and the way the created panel will look. Components can be added to the panel with a label and/or an icon (lines 3-7), or alone (line 9). By default components stretch to occupy all the space they get, but this can be changed using modifiers (lines 9, 10). L_END (stands for "line end") and GROW (stands for "grow") are statically imported constants, and are in fact full-blown object that implement the BehaviorModifier interface - so you can create your own modifiers if you need 'em. Client code can add headers (lines 2, 8) and flexible spaces (not shown). The default implementation uses a pluggable component factory to create all the extra components involved (e.g. JLabels), so you can customize them when the defaults won't do.

But there's more than just layout to PanelMatic. In "PanelMatic 101", Michael covers customizers (for listening to all components on a panel), localizations, building panels using expressions, and advanced customizations. Read the article for the details, and visit the PanelMatic project site to get started with using PanelMatic.

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, several people have posted new java.net blogs:

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks How soon do you plan to start using the just-released NetBeans 7.1?. Voting will be open until Friday, January 20.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Roger Brinkley's Java Spotlight Episode 64: NetBeans 7.1 Release:

Interview with Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manger in Oracle Developer Tools on NetBeans 7.1 release. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Daniel deOliveira, Java Champion and DFJUG Leader...

Previously, we highlighted the new article by Adam Bien: Interfaces on Demand with CDI and EJB 3.1:

Since Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6), interfaces are no longer required by the container in order to realize common use cases. Transactions, security, custom aspects, concurrency, and monitoring are also available for plain classes without any interfaces. Java EE 6 made interfaces meaningful again...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

Blog Links >>

Java.net Poll and Dice.com Survey: Looking Ahead to a Bright 2012 for Java Developers!

Posted by editor on January 10, 2012 at 1:30 AM EST

Lots of people wanted to express their expectations for 2012 in the most recent java.net poll. A total of 856 votes were cast in the poll, and one comment was posted. Here is the exact question, and the results:

The most important Java/JVM news/event/happening in 2012 will be related to:

  • 12% (106 votes) - The Cloud
  • 17% (142 votes) - Java EE
  • 18% (152 votes) - Java SE / OpenJDK
  • 10% (89 votes) - JavaFX
  • 6% (55 votes) - Java ME
  • 4% (34 votes) - Non-Java JVM Languages
  • 22% (186 votes) - Android
  • 3% (27 votes) - Other
  • 8% (65 votes) - I don't know

Clearly, there is no real consensus on what will be the most important Java/JVM topic in 2012. I suppose that's actually a good thing, if it implies that people see Java "moving forward" in many different areas. For me, the new vision for development of the broad spectrum of Java technologies, and their integration, that was presented starting at JavaOne 2011, suggests that indeed we can expect strong advances in many different areas of Java and the JVM in 2012.

Companies are noticing, as well. For example, the United States software engineering job site Dice.com published the results of a survey of 1,200 tech-focused hiring managers and recruiters, finding that the top priority for 2012 among this group is finding Java / J2EE developers. Here are the Top 10 priorities identified by the recruiters:

The number 3 item in the Dice survey (Mobile Developers) synchronizes with Android receiving a 22% plurality of the voting in our Java.net survey. I am increasingly seeing evidence that what's happening in the mobile apps arena is fairly akin to what was happening in the mid to late 1990s (i.e., the .com boom). Every company then was petrified of being left behind by the Web train that was leaving the station. Today, something similar seems to be happening with respect to mobile platforms: everyone has to have a mobile app, every company. The sense is that you're dead (in the future, they think) without one.

Of course, as in the .com boom, everyone's probably right about this: you will have to be present on mobile platforms in the future. What's not happening (so far) is companies thinking start-ups with any random mobile-centric idea are suddenly worth (in terms of corporate value) far more than companies that have been global leaders for many decades. I was very worried about this (profitless NASDAQ start-ups having stock market valuations that exceeded those of long-established NYSE corporations) as I watched it unfold during the .com boom.

But maybe there won't be a mobile bust anytime soon, just a nice enduring boomlet for developers. I don't right now see the same type of symptoms I saw in the late 1990s and 2000. This time, it seems like most of the hiring is being done by the established companies themselves. Their response to their mobile frenzy is to try to bring more developers in house, or into consulting agreements. This makes each mobile developer in essence a self-contained "start-up" -- kind of nice, no?

Getting back to Java: note that a great many mobile apps tie into a back-end server farm. This is one of multiple areas where Java EE fits in.

Then, there's the comment that was posted to our Java.net poll by Java.net user m1k0, who thinks the most important Java/JVM news/event/happening in 2012 will be related to: "Java SE + JavaFx for mobiles."

Know what? The power of many modern mobile phones exceeds the power of most computers we originally developed Java applications for way back when. For example, I just bought an HTC Wildfire S phone with a 600 MHz processor and 512 MB RAM (expandable to 32 GB). Around the year 2000, a clock speed of 600 MHz was pretty good indeed:

Then there are all those faster, and multi-core, phones that cost a bit more than mine!

Java SE was originally designed to run on desktop computers that were even less powerful than today's typical mid-level mobile phones. I think m1k0 may be onto something here!

I'd like to thank all the developers who took the time to vote in our "looking ahead to 2012" poll.

New poll: NetBeans 7.1

Our new Java.net poll is much more specific. It asks How soon do you plan to start using the just-released NetBeans 7.1? Voting will be open until Friday, January 20.

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, several people have posted worthy new java.net blogs:

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is SWELL - An English-Like DSL for Swing Testing by Sanjay Dasgupta and Chirantan Kundu.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Terrence Barr's Revving Mobile Java: OJWC 3.1 released -

With over 3 billion devices and counting, Java on mobile devices is enjoying growth and huge adoption in many key markets around the world. In the meantime, developers are pushing to build richer and more interesting applications, both from a functional as well as a user interface perspective. New use cases in mCommerce, social networking, location-based services...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

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NetBeans IDE Version 7.1 Has Been Released

Posted by editor on January 5, 2012 at 8:31 AM EST

The NetBeans team announces that NetBeans Version 7.1 has been released:

NetBeans IDE 7.1 introduces support for JavaFX 2.0 by enabling the full compile/debug/profile development cycle for JavaFX 2.0 applications. The release also provides significant Swing GUI Builder enhancements, CSS3 support, tools for visual debugging of Swing and JavaFX user interfaces and support for Oracle WebLogic Server 12c. Additional highlights include Git support integrated into the IDE, new PHP debugging features, various JavaEE and Maven improvements, and more...

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, there have been a couple new Java.net blogs posted by others in our community:

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks you to respond to The most important Java/JVM news/event/happening in 2012 will be related to.... Voting will be open until Friday, January 6.

Articles

Our latest java.net article is SWELL - An English-Like DSL for Swing Testing by Sanjay Dasgupta and Chirantan Kundu.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Richard Bair's 2012 JavaFX Resolutions:

Ok, hokey title. Jonathan wrote up a really great retrospective on 2011 for JavaFX, and it inspired me to want to write a post detailing the plans and goals I have for JavaFX in the new year (and I'm sure Jonathan and Jasper would concur). Without further ado, my top 10 list of goals for 2012...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

 
Blog Links >>