Steve On Java

It is kind of ironic, but after a year running I have never spoken at my own user group.  In November I am going to break the trend and present an updated version of the JavaFX Alternative Language talk that I gave at JavaOne. You can sign-up for the event here:

http://www.svjugfx.org/calendar/14264038/

Note: Even if you plan on attending online, please make sure to sign-up above so you get reminders for the broadcast.

Since Jonathan Giles and I originally gave the talk, the JavaFX 2.0 APIs have gotten closer to completion, interest in the JVM Language Communities has grown, and I have launched the Visage project to carry forward JavaFX Script.

   LEONARDO da Vinci's "La Scapigliata"

Digression {
  var link = Hyperlink {
    name: "Jim Weaver's blog"
    url: "http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/"
  }
  description: "Speaking of Visage, I am looking for"
  "a logo for the project.  I would have gone with"
  "Matisse's \"Visage - Mask\" from {link} but it was"
  "created in 1951 and has an active copyright.  The"
  "current front runner is LEONARDO da Vinci's \"La"
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Invite your language-guru geek friends too.  I want as much feedback as possible on the suggested APIs so they can be used to improve the underlying JavaFX 2.0 APIs prior to release.  As usual, we will be taking questions online via Google Moderator.

As always, I will have the very latest and greatest content to share (at great demo peril to myself).

I hope to see you there!

I haven’t talked much about Flash technology on my blog, but we use quite a bit of Flash/Flex for developing enterprise apps at my day job.  With the Open Screen Project from Adobe making Flash available on mobile and embedded devices, Flash has become a viable cross-platform toolkit fulfilling a lot of what I hoped JavaFX Mobile would become.

Yesterday at Silicon Valley Code Camp I did a talk on Flash Android development to a packed room.  About half the audience were Flash/Flex users, with a smaller, but very vocal, contingent of Android developers.  The goal of the talk was to help get folks off the ground with Flash Mobile development using the Android SDK in combination with Flash CS5 or Flash Builder 4.

The examples for the talk came from the upcoming Pro Android Flash book that I am writing for Apress together with Oswald Campesato and Dean Iverson.  This book will be coming out around Spring 2011, but there is already quite a lot of good content that we have finished.  The responses I got from attendees of the talk were extremely positive, but check out the presentation and see for yourself:

Download the PDF

As I continue working on the book, I plan to increase the coverage on Flash and Flex Mobile in this blog.  It is a slight shift, but consistent with my philosophy around promoting rich client technologies, and won’t decrease my focus on JavaFX.  Hopefully you find some value in this as a technology that integrates well with Java and opens up some new mobile deployment capabilities.

Followers of my blog have probably heard about the Apropos project that I built in JavaFX and released as open-source.  It is an Agile Project Portfolio Planning tool that I developed for work to help manage our large Agile rollout. Apropos is a perfect application of rich client technology, because it sits on top of the web services exposed by Rally, and provides a higher level of visibility and planning.

The folks at Rally Software took notice and have been contributing back to the project to get it customer ready.  They have branded the commercial version of the tool Stratus and are now in the process of a customer beta.

Some of the features that the Rally folks have added to Stratus include:

• Customization of fields and settings
• Performance improvements in the web service communication
• Styling and usability improvements throughout
• A fully hosted environment for customers to use Stratus without any setup

I had the opportunity to present with Ryan Martens, Rally CTO, at the JavaOne Keynote to demonstrate the very latest version:

It was a cool experience to be on the big stage.  I have heard that a lot of presenters get scripted to death in preparation for Keynotes (or at least it always looks that way), but I had a lot of freedom to ad-lib and blend in my demo with Ryan’s talk.

If you or your company are interested in piloting Stratus, send email to stratus@rallydev.com and Rally can engage with your program managers.