Steve On Java

The JavaOne Call for Proposals is going to stay open until April 23rd, so you have a few extra days to get in those last minute submissions.

http://www.oracle.com/javaone/index.html

Still don’t know what to submit for a talk, here are some ideas:

• Java + Devices – With the Early Access of Java 8 for ARM, you can do a lot of cool stuff on tiny little devices.  Anyone for hacking Java onto a robot, quadcopter, or refrigerator? [well, maybe that last one wasn't so tiny...]
• Java 8/9 Hacking – While the Java 8 and 9 releases are still forthcoming, you can already play with the bits via the Early Access lambda releases and OpenJDK Jigsaw builds.  Why not get ahead of the curve and show us what Java development will be like 5 years from now!
• 353-356-352-236-343 – What do these numbers have in common?  Yes, you guessed it correctly, these are some of the many JSR specs that make up the new Java EE 7 release.  There is a lot of ground to cover here, so share some of your JSON/WebSocket/Batch Kung-fu with your peers.  :)
• Duke in 3 Dimensions – The new JavaFX 3D support opens up some pretty cool possibilities that were only fathomable in fancy JavaOne keynotes. Now the rest of us can play with real 3D APIs via the JavaFX 8 Early Access and create some compelling demos and presentations for JavaOne.

I am sure you have some cool ideas of other things you would like to hear about as well…  and if you are interested, chances are that a lot of folks would appreciate a talk on it that you can help make happen!

We started a new rolling admission process for JavaOne this year where we are reviewing and accepting some of the top talks while the Call for Proposals (CFP) is still open. This gives us a chance to highlight a few of the great speakers and talks coming in and encourages external submissions early and often.

If you haven’t already submitted to the JavaOne CFP, it is still open through this Friday. If your talk gets accepted you get a free pass to attend JavaOne, and the opportunity to speak to your peers and influence the future of Java development technologies and practices.

Here is a link to the JavaOne CFP site: http://www.oracle.com/javaone/call-for-papers/information/index.html

The first round of invitations just went out.  We haven’t gotten confirmation from all of these speakers yet on their acceptance, but are honored to have them submitting to JavaOne 2013 (in no particular order):

Please join me in congratulation the above speakers on their invitations, and take inspiration from what they have done to submit some JavaOne sessions of your own!

Jfokus is the premiere Java conference in Northern Europe, and the final destination on the Nordic NightHacking Tour. I will be live streaming the activities on the Jfokus stage all day next Tuesday (Feb 5th) and Wednesday (Feb 6th).

This includes interviews the Java Posse Live! event, James Gosling’s Liquid Robotics presentation, and interviews with Venkat Subramaniam, Holly Cummins, Noam Tenne, and Heinz Kabutz.

Here is the full agenda grid:

I had a great team hacking with the JUGICE members in Iceland last night as the first stop on the Nordic NightHacking Tour. They created some pretty cool projects in JavaFX for the Raspberry Pi within only a few hours (many of whom had never tried JavaFX before):

You can see that these guys are real geeks (Pacman), but have the weather on their mind quite a bit (Snowplow), so why are they in Iceland? Here are some of the reasons I came up with for being a hacker in Iceland:

1. Tired of Monitor Glare

In the winter Iceland only has 4-5 hours of sunlight, so forget about fancy anti-glare screens or fighting with the blinds… you won’t need it in Iceland!

2. You Aren’t Good at Sharing Bandwidth

There is nothing I hate more than my neighbors slowing down my Java update by playing games or downloading movies. In the U.S. they typically oversell bandwidth in the hopes that most consumers won’t use it. In contrast, Iceland is one of the top countries in the world for internet access with over 8% of the broadband connections using optical fiber and 626.8 Mbit/s per 10,000 population. My informal test at the JUGICE meeting broke the speed test, hitting their max test threshold of 100 Mbit/s on both download and upload!

3. You Like Your Sushi Properly Aged

Sushi is a great food for hackers, but it can be dangerous if it is not fresh enough. Fortunately, the Icelandic people have perfected the art of fish preservation so you don’t have to worry about your wind-dried fish, shark, or seal’s flippers going bad.

Yum, Harðfiskur!

4. Your Home Supercomputer Cluster is Destroying the Planet

You need good tools to do hacking, and that often comes at the price of power conservation. I am pretty sure every time I run a compile on my beefy quad-core system, the temperature of the earth goes up by a fraction of a degree. Fortunately, in Iceland all the power comes from renewable geothermal sources, so you can run your very own supercomputer cluster in your basement!

Note: You don’t really have to move to Iceland to do this, because the folks at Green Cloud have figured out how to package this up as a service so you can remotely take advantage of Iceland’s renewable natural resources.

5. You’ve Always Wanted to Meet Gosling’s Cousins

Iceland has a complete genealogy tree dating back to the Norwegian settlers in the 9th century, and geneologists say that all Icelanders are descendants of bishop Jón Arason. James Gosling is half Icelandic on his mother’s side, so when he went to visit last time he was surprised how many cousins he had! Maybe it is worth a trip just to visit all 320,000 of the relatives of the Father of Java.

I certainly had a great time in Iceland and would recommend at least a visit.

In the meantime, join the rest of the live-streamed trip throughout Northern Europe on the NightHacking Nordic Tour:

http://nighthacking.com/

With the trip coming up in a week, I figured it was about time to put the full event itinerary in one place. For this I created a public Nordic NightHacking Google Calendar containing all of the events along with links to sign-up.

All the events will be streamed-live, so you can participate from the comfort of your office/living-room. Some of the features I am adding this time around to make watching sessions more enjoyable include:
* Low-bandwidth option – All talks are going to be streamed at full resolution (480/720p) as well as 240p in case you are watching over a phone or low-bandwidth connection.
* Realtime chat – The social stream stuff is cute, but not the same as realtime chat, so I added an IRC-based chat option in the UStream broadcast. Feel free to use both, but I know where the hecklers will be hanging out.
* And some special guest appearances – I have a few special guests lined up for JFokus, including James Gosling and the Java Posse, so please watch out for these!

If you happen to be in Iceland, Gothenburg, or Malmo, there are free JUG events organized for all those cities; please click on the event details to register. I am working on similar events for Oslo, Copenhagen, and Tallinn, so stay tuned. Also, if you want to join me for snowmobiling in Turku, or hang out in Iceland or Tallinn on the weekend, ping me on my contact form.

The following schedule and full details of the tour are available on the NightHacking site:
http://nighthacking.com/

Timezone
US/Pacific US/Eastern Sao Paulo Greenwich Mean Time Central European Time Eastern European Time India Standard Time

Special thanks to AppleMan-K83 for use of his Lego Snowmobile pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32870260@N04/7996880922/in/photostream

My last NightHacking tour through Europe was a huge success, but I missed a big part of Europe. The farthest North I was able to go was the United Kingdom, which means I missed all the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, and Finland.

I am now planning the NightHacking Nordic Tour from Jan 25 – Feb 7 leading up to the greatest conference in Northern Europe, Jfokus. So what will this new tour include?

Interviews with some very interesting Java/EE/FX folks including:

• Aslak
• Martin/Par
• Joonas
• (more to come…)

User group visits across the Nordic countries:

• Iceland JUG
• Malmo
• Oslo – Javabin
• Gothenburg
• Cophenhagen (Javagruppen)

And finishing up with a great community conference

• Jfokus

Here is the travel map for the NightHacking Nordic Tour:

Please join me for the live stream as I travel across Northern Europe, and if you are in the area drop by in person for one of the user group events or meet me at Jfokus.

http://nighthacking.com/

The long awaited early access of JavaFX on Raspberry Pi is finally out.  This is a great platform for doing small embedded projects, a low cost computing system for teaching, and great fun for hobbyists.  It only costs $35 for the Model B version with 512MB RAM, 700MHz ARM processor and I/O for HDMI, Composite, Audio, Ethernet, and 2 USB ports.

So what can you do with JavaFX on a Raspberry Pi?  A great example is the digital signage that we put together for Devoxx showing the conference schedule flying by on animated space ships:

Update: And if you are not convinced that Java is performant on the Pi, check out Rich Bair’s post on fxexperience.com: http://fxexperience.com/2012/12/javafx-on-raspberry-pi/

So if you are convinced to get started, there are 3 easy steps to get JavaFX running on your Pi:

1. Install Linux on your Raspberry Pi
2. Download and copy Java/JavaFX 8 to your Pi
3. Deploy and run JavaFX apps on your Pi

This does assume you have a Pi…  For questions about where to get a Pi, how to power it, etc., I would recommend checking out the Raspberry Pi Site.

Step 1 – Installing Linux on Your Raspberry Pi

The latest Java 8 release is hard float, which is a good thing, because it gives you better performance and the recommended Raspberry Pi build is also hard float.  Stay away from anything that says soft, softfp, etc., because it will be incompatible with the hard float JVM.

Note: Why all this fuss over floating point?  Well, low power embedded systems skip the floating point hardware to save cost (e.g. ARM Cortex M0-M3).  Fortunately the ARMv6 chip used in the Raspberry Pi has real floating point support.

To setup Linux on your SD card, you will need a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop with an SD Card Reader/Writer.  The distribution you want is the latest Raspbian Wheezy hard float build, which is the recommended install on the Raspberry Pi download site:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

To burn the image you have a few options, which are detailed here, but basically boil down to:

• Windows: Use Win32DiskImager
• Mac: Use the RPi-sd Card Builder
• Linux: Use the dd command

Once your SD card is created, take your Raspberry Pi out of the box, pop in the SD Card, hook it up to a monitor or TV lying around your place, and plug it up to a nice usb power brick (5V 700mA or greater).

Warning: Order Matters! – If you don’t hook up an HDMI monitor before powering on the Pi, it assumes composite.  This means if the lights are flashing but you get a blank screen, you should try rebooting the Pi (by unplugging and replugging it in).

At this point, your Pi should bootup and show you the Raspberry Pi config screen.  There are some things you might want to consider tweaking here, including:

• CPU/GPU memory split – Give the GPU at least 128MB of ram so graphical heavy apps will run better (important for JavaFX!)
• Change the locale/keyboard/timezone – Default settings are for the UK, so everyone else should change these or you will be cursing at your keyboard when trying to type punctuation!
• Overscan – If your display has black bars around the edges, turn this off so you can use the full resolution.
• Expand root filesystem – It can do an online resize of your card to use the full space (default image has a tiny 2GB root partition).  Highly recommended, but expect this to take a while on a large card.
• SSH – Turn this on if you want to access your Pi over the network (this is the only way to shut down rogue JavaFX processes short of rebooting)

In the official JavaFX Raspberry Pi docs they also recommend hacking the framebuffer to be 720p in the config file (/boot/config.txt) by uncommenting these lines:

framebuffer_width=1280
framebuffer_height=720

This is not strictly required, but will give you better performance since the Pi is pushing fewer pixels.  If you are going to do this, you might also want to force the Pi to run in 720 resolution as well to avoid pixel upscaling.  Don’t try hacking the display settings unless you know what you are doing (and have an ssh terminal to login remotely in case you kill the display).  For more info about the HDMI display nodes, check out the docs here.

Step 2 – Download and Copy Java/JavaFX 8 to Your Pi

You can download a Raspberry Pi compatible Java/JavaFX 8 build here:

http://jdk8.java.net/fxarmpreview

If your Pi is hooked up to the network via ethernet you can download it directly to the device.  Otherwise copy it over using sftp (via ssh) or sneakernet (a USB key).

Once you have it downloaded, you can unzip it to a location of your choice:

sudo tar -zxvf file_name -C /opt

And then to run java use a command like the following:

sudo /opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -version

Step 3 – Deploy and Run JavaFX Apps on Your Pi

Almost any JavaFX desktop application will run on the Pi simply by copying over the jar file and executing it locally, with no modifications.  (The 2 exceptions to this are applications that rely on WebView or MediaView, both of which are unimplemented in the current dev preview)

A great way to get started building JavaFX applications for the Pi is to use Scene Builder to quickly put together a user interface visually, and then deploy that to the Pi.  I did this last night at the Linux Users’ Group of Davis (LUGOD), quickly putting together a sample application with help from the very astute attendees (I also learned a thing or two about linux command tricks along the way from the audience).

I posted our 15 minute application in GitHub as an example you can try:

https://github.com/steveonjava/LUGOD-Pi-Test

To run it on the Pi, build the source with your favorite IDE (or straight form the command line) and build a jar file.  Then copy the jar file to your Pi and run it with a command like the following:

sudo /opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -Djavafx.platform=eglfb \
-cp /opt/jdk1.8.0/jre/lib/jfxrt.jar:LUGODTest.jar lugodtest.LUGODTest

Here is a picture of the Scene Builder project and the output we got on the Raspberry Pi during the LUGOD meeting:

However, the most impressive demo is your own.  Try deploying your own JavaFX applications and leave others pointers to apps you have deployed in the comments below!

JavaOne Latin America in Sao Paulo Brazil just ended.  It was a great event that had a huge community presence, which was responsible for selecting over 50% oft the content, and supported it throughout.

This started off on Sunday with the Geek Bike ride where over 50 geeks donned bike helmets and took over the streets of Sao Paulo.  I took plenty of photos of the event, which you can find on my steveonjava flickr account, and in the geekbikeride photostream:

The event was even bigger than last year with a 50% increase in registrations.  Also, we took advantage of the newly built out wing of the Transamerica Expo Center, which afforded much more room and newer facilities for the event.

I gave my updated presentation on JavaFX and HTML5 this afternoon, including some new updates that Felipe and I made to demonstrate calling back from a JavaScript event handler to Java code.  The full code is now available on GitHub here:

https://github.com/steveonjava/javaconferencetour

And you can see the presentation I gave in its entirety on slideshare:

This was a great start to our regional JavaOne conferences, which we will have more exciting news on soon!

I just finished my NightHacking Tour across Europe. In 3 weeks, I hit 2 conferences, 5 user groups, and did over 30 interviews with NightHackers in 7 different countries.

Some of the highlights included:

• Motorcycle ride-ons at JFall and Devoxx (Thanks Bert and Stephan!)
• JUG hacking events in London, Munich, Tourin, Lyon, and Paris
• Dancing robots at Aldebaran Robotics

In case you missed any of the NightHacking sessions the past month, I put together a YouTube playlist containing all of the video files:

And you can catch the photos from across Europe in my NightHacking Flickr Stream:

So what is next? Well, I have a few ideas, but can use your help to decide what to do. So here is a short survey you can take to let me know what should be the next NightHacking event.

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Also, I have been thinking of doing a NightHacking Show at a regularly scheduled time with online guests.

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If you have other comments or suggestions for NightHacking, please leave them in the comment section below.

In addition to the sessions I am giving at Devoxx, I also lined up an all-star set of speakers to have interviews with at Devoxx.  I will be running these Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning (CET).

To watch the show, go to the nighthacking show page here:

http://nighthacking.com/

And here is the full schedule:

• Wed 12:00 CET – Kirk Pepperdine
• Wed 13:00 CET – Bill Venners
• Wed 15:10 CET – Emmanuel Bernard
• Wed 16:40 CET – Antonio Goncalves
• Wed 17:50 CET – Dan Allen
• Thu 10:50 CET – Heather VanCura
• Thu 12:00 CET – Stephan Janssen

Also, in case you missed it, I uploaded the full tour of Aldebaran Robotics featuring the NAO robot, which was a pretty amazing experience: