OSCON Java is a new conference that I am helping to kick off as co-chair this July.  While there are plenty of conferences out there that you could attend, I am confident that this is the one you won’t want to miss.

To celebrate the Java 7 release, I put together 7 reasons why you should attend OSCON Java.  Also, make sure to use the 20% discount code of “OS11COM” when you register:

1. Come Celebrate the First New Java Release in Half a Decade!

The last major release of Java was Java 6, which came out 5 years ago on December 11, 2006. After only a year of the Sun acquisition, Oracle has already made a major Java release happen with another scheduled in a year’s time.

We have broad coverage of the Java 7 release with a keynote and technical session by Joe Darcy, and technical sessions on OpenJDK and Coin by Dalibor Topic and Stuart Marks. I have been pretty impressed with Stuart’s coverage of topics from a developer’s perspective and am looking forward to his talk myself.

2. Because Google Matters

Regardless of what you think about the Android lawsuit, I think the biggest detriment has been the lack of good content on Google technologies at Java conferences. We are an independent conference, so it allows us to bring content that you would otherwise not find, such as an exclusive keynote from Joshua Bloch and several mobile Android sessions to help you leverage your Java skills on modern devices.

3. You Think JVM Languages are Cool

It has been said that the crown jewel of the Java platform is the JVM, not the language. Java 7 has further solidified this with better support for dynamic languages. Come find out what is the latest and greatest on the alternative language front with a keynote and some meaty sessions from Martin Odersky, deep technical sessions on Groovy, Clojure, Scala, and other languages, and some bytecode hacking with Charles Nutter.

4. And You Wouldn’t Mind Hanging out with JVM language Authors for a Day…

On the Sunday before OSCON we are organizing a free JVM Languages Symposium that many of the speakers will be attending.  This is a great opportunity to hang out with JVM language authors and the movers and shakers in the industry in an informal unconference atmosphere.  Events like this are what I believe sets apart community-driven conferences from large corporate events, and provide a lot more value to the attendees than simply one-way content.  If you happen to be in the Portland area, you can drop by for this free event with no obligation to stay for OSCON.

5. Your Boss Won’t Let You Fly to Belgium

I travel to speak at different conferences around the world and I would have to say that the golden standard for Java conferences is Devoxx. They have an amazing venue — it is great to see your slides on a huge movie screen, and relaxing for attendees to take it in from nice, plush seats. They attract an international audience… not only Belgium, but Italy, France, Germany, and citizens of many of the other surrounding countries consider Devoxx their home conference. Even though Devoxx is a wildly successful conference, they still have a small-conference feel, run by a very tight knit conference committee that acts more like a user group than an organization. This makes the entire conference experience much more personalized.

OSCON Java has a lot of similarities with Devoxx. It has a small, enthusiastic program committee with folks who really care about Java technologies. We are also following the Devoxx model of recording and posting talks online afterwards, so even if you miss a great talk because you are in the room next door, you can always watch it online later. Finally, since we are an independent conference, you get the full experience of Java, Android, and other technologies that you would otherwise have to go to multiple conferences to see.

6. OSCON is a Pretty Sweet Conference as Well…

The O’Reilly OSCON conference has been underrepresented in the Java community, but is a pretty huge event in its own right.  They have some amazing content around emerging languages and mobile platforms.  Plus, you can get OSCON, OSCON Java, and OSCON Data all wrapped up in one neat package with the OSCON Superpass.

7. There is Only One Inaugural Year!

This is our first year putting on OSCON Java, so we are pulling out all the stops with the best speakers, tutorials, content, and events.  You will have a unique opportunity to participate in the creation of a new Java tradition, and a decade from now can brag to your friends about being a founding attendee of the biggest open-source Java conference in the world.

It is pretty easy to get lost in the media hype around the Java events of the past year.  If you follow the headlines, you might believe that all the Java talent left Oracle in a mass exodus, Larry hates open source, or Java is turning into the next COBOL.  Regardless of the factual correctness of these headlines, the Java ecosystem is about more than a single company or set of individuals.  Java has the largest open-source community of any language in existence!

So how big is Java and open-source?  Here is an informal search poll of some of the most popular open-source project hosting providers:

The data for this chart comes from the top six open-source hosting providers using Google Search as a metric for gauging activity level for each of the platforms.  As you can see, Java is still the most active open-source platform in the world, followed closely by PHP and Python.  While not an indicator of language popularity, Bill Gates has gone on record speaking out against open source, so the poor representation from the C# community is not surprising.

This takes us to OSCON Java, which is a new conference I am helping to kick off as conference co-chair together with Laurel Ruma.  It is colocated with OSCON in Portland, Oregon, but is exclusively focused on Java and open source.  O’Reilly is the conference organizer, but they are very neutral when it comes to corporations and technologies.  This allows us to reach out to a wide variety of Java technology players including Apache, Google, Adobe, Oracle, the JCP, and many others.

We have big plans for the OSCON Java keynotes, technical content, and exhibitors.  Also, we are working on making this a model conference from the get-go based on my experience attending and speaking at premier conference venues across the world.  Expect a huge focus on community outreach, a lot of interaction between speakers and attendees, and a particular focus on the JVM languages of tomorrow.

If you are interested in participating as a speaker, it is still not too late to submit a talk.  The CFP ends on March 28th (4 days!), so you still have time to submit a last minute talk:

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/cfp/159

If you have a great idea, but can’t get your talk together in time or miss the deadline by a few days, shoot me an e-mail via the contact form on my blog.

I look forward to seeing you at OSCON Java, uniting the Java open-source community towards a brighter future!

I am pleased to announce the Flash On… user group that I am kicking off together with Keith Sutton, Oswald Campesato, and Justin Webb.  The focus is Flash on consumer devices from Mobile to Tablet to TV.

Oswald and I will be doing the inaugural presentation on Flash mobile technologies this evening.  You can catch the live stream on Adobe Connect here:

http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/flashondevices/
(Stream starts at 7PM PST!)

For those of you who haven’t been following the Flash Mobile headlines, there have been a lot of great announcements that make this platform worth developing for:

Mobile

• With the AIR 2.5 release, Android devices are fully supported
• Apple has relaxed their license to allow Flash-based applications in the App Store
• Similar announcements have come from other vendors such as Palm, Windows 7, and others

TV

• Google TV prominently features Flash support
• Adobe also announced AIR support for Samsung devices such as Smart TVs and Blu-ray Players

Tablet

• Blackberry announced Adobe AIR support for their Playbook Tablet

Here is an excerpt from the Adobe Max 2010 keynote that shows off the Blackberry Playbook Tablet running Flash:

When put together, Flash is well poised to become the defacto standard for building rich user experiences across different screens.

We will cover all this and more in our presentation tonight.  As usual, we will have high production values for the talk with side-by-side presenter video and slides plus a chat area to ask questions.  I hope to see you there!

I am pleased to announce the Visage Language, a domain specific language (DSL) for writing user interfaces.

http://visage-lang.org/

User interface developers have long been neglected and forced to deal with languages and tooling that are a poor fit for their craft.  At times they are asked to write user interfaces in languages originally meant for server-side applications such as C and Java.  In other instances they are required to use a markup language originally meant for representing documents or structured data such as HTML and XML.  These are fine technologies for the applications in which they were originally intended, but a weak substitute for declaring and representing user interfaces.

The goal of Visage is to provide a common language for user interface developers that provides the following benefits:

1. Model the UI – The code should look like the user interface with a similar structure to how the resulting application will appear.
2. Data Binding – All user interfaces have a backend model, so it should be easy and painless to hook this up to the UI with bidirectional integration.
3. Resilient Behavior – The last thing you want to see during a customer demo of your new application is a NullPointerException.  Language constructs should have deterministic, but fault tolerant behavior in all cases.
4. Rapid Development – Application development should allow rapid, iterative cycles with early feedback starting right at the compilation phase.

The way in which Visage satisfies these requirements is summarized in the following table:

So what does a Visage application look like?  Here is Hello World in the Visage language:

Stage {
  title: "Hello World"
  Scene {
    Text {
      "Hello World"
    }
  }
}

This code should look familiar to readers of my blog.  It is based on the JavaFX Script language with a few (proposed) syntactic additions.

For those of you who don’t know the history of JavaFX Script, it was originally designed by Christopher Oliver and called F3 for Form Follows Function.  With the acquisition of SeeBeyond by Sun, this technology became the cornerstone of JavaFX and was open sourced in 2007 at JavaOne.  Oracle purchased Sun and just this past week at JavaOne 2010 announced that they are going to continue with the JavaFX Platform, but replace the JavaFX Script language with Java APIs.  We are adopting the JavaFX Compiler for use in the Visage project, and plan to continue evolving it.

Here are some of the goals of the Visage project:

• Provide a JavaFX Java API Binding – One of the most innovative parts of the JavaFX platform was the language, and it is what all JavaFX applications are written in today.  Our number 1 project goal is to make sure that developers can continue to write declarative code and easily port over their existing applications.
• Enhance the Visage Language – The language syntax remains largely unchanged since the 1.0 release of JavaFX.  We plan on making numerous improvements that will be beneficial to UI programmers and make common patterns easier to code.
• Support for Other Platforms – For the Visage language to thrive, it has to be a general purpose UI programming language.  Some other platforms that are in great need of a UI DSL include HTML5, Flex, and Android.
• Language Standardization – We would like to see the Visage language be made an official standard with possibly multiple implementations.

If you are interested in following the project or helping out, please join the Google Groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/visage-users

http://groups.google.com/group/visage-dev

There were some huge announcements at JavaOne today for the JavaFX platform.  Overall I think the announcements show some very positive momentum for the future of JavaFX and rich client Java, but there were some casualties…

In this blog I will cover the salient bits, but if you would like an opportunity to hear it directly from the JavaFX leadership team in a free event, we will be hosting a JavaFX 2.0 event with Richard Bair and Jai Suri at our next SvJugFX meeting.  As usual, the event will be streamed live, and questions can be asked remotely via Google Moderator.

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The Good Parts:

Java and Alternative JVM Languages

JavaFX has a new API face.  All the JavaFX 2.0 APIs will be exposed via Java classes that will make it much easier to integrate Java server and client code.  This also opens up some huge possibilities for JVM language integration with JavaFX that Jonathan Giles and I explored in our JavaOne talk today.  We did a whirlwind tour through four different JVM languages (Ruby, Clojure, Groovy, and Scala) showing what JavaFX 2.0 code may look like when ported to these different languages.

Here is the full presentation deck:

Which can also be downloaded as a PDF.

Open Source Controls

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If you preregistered for any JavaFX sessions at JavaOne, you probably noticed a bit of churn in the past few weeks.  I actually requested that they drop my talk entitled “Take Control of JavaFX”, because Jonathan and I didn’t think we could do justice to the topic.

However, we came up with an alternative talk, which we believe will be even better and more topical.  Here are the talk details:

JavaFX Your Way: Building JavaFX Applications with Alternative Languages
Abstract: JavaFX is more than a language. It is also a platform for building immersive applications with graphics, animation, and rich media. In this session, you will see how you can leverage JavaFX from a host of different JVM languages, including Java, JRuby, Groovy, Scala, and Clojure.

The talk is on Monday at 4PM in Hilton San Francisco, Golden Gate 8.  Hope to see you there!

I am honored to be accepted by some great conferences to speak on JavaFX.  Each of the talks I am giving is unique, which means more work for me, but is a great opportunity to talk about some different topics that I think are important for folks using JavaFX.

First up is Jazoon in Zurich, Switzerland on June 1-3.  I have heard great things about this conference from folks who have attended in past years, and have already heard from some folks who will be attending my talk.  The topic for my session will be Building Data Rich Interfaces with JavaFX.  I have some good content lined up from my open source projects (actually too much content), so it should be a great session.

Next I will be speaking at JavaOne in my hometown of San Francisco on September 19-23.  Oracle is pulling out all the stops for this conference, taking over a full block of Mason Street as the JavaOne “Zone”.  They will be putting up a big tent with videostreaming and other festivities, in addition to the 4,000 square feet of space dedicated to talks and sessions.  For those of you who are not aware of the magnitude of Oracle, here is a shot of what they have done in past years for Oracle Open World:

I am fortunate enough to be able to co-present 2 Technical Sessions and 2 BOFs at JavaOne 2010:

Technical Session 1: Pro JavaFX: Developing Enterprise Applications
Co-presented with Jim Weaver

Technical Session 2: Take Control of JavaFX
Co-presented with Jonathan Giles from the JavaFX Control Team

Birds of a Feather Session 1: JFXtras: JavaFX Controls, Layouts, Services, and More
Co-presented with Dean Iverson and the rest of the JFXtras Team

Birds of a Feather Session 2: JavaFX Author JAM
Co-presented with Jim Weaver, Jim Clarke, Dean Iverson, and many other JavaFX authors (to be announced)

If you haven’t already, it is not too late to book your ticket for JavaOne.  This will definitely be a year you won’t want to miss!

At the Lean Software and Systems Conference a week ago, Israel Gat, Erik Huddleston, and I did a presentation on Reformulating the Product Delivery Process.  At the end of this talk, we unveiled an open-source, JavaFX tool called Apropos that we use for Product Portfolio Planning at Inovis.

Note: The data has been blurred to hide corporate information.  The final release will include a test bed of public data, which can be used for display and testing.

What you are seeing in the above screenshot is the Portfolio Kanban View that we use for tracking features through their full lifecycle from proposal through validation.  It is backed by the Rally Agile Lifecycle Management tool, which exposes Web Services for accessing all of our planning data.  The entire UI was written in JavaFX, and makes heavy use of JFXtras features, such as the XTableView.

The plan for this tool is to do the initial launch of a BSD-licensed open-source version on May 22nd.  This will include support for the Rally Community Edition, which is free for up to 10 users.  In future releases we plan to support other Agile Lifecycle Management tools, both commercial and open-source, but will need assistance from the community to do this.

If you are interested in helping out with this project, please contact me.  I will have limited bandwidth until after the initial launch, but after that would love to scale up this project with interested parties.

Here is the full presentation, which includes additional screenshots of Apropos at the end (slides 15-19):

JavaFX 1.3 has just gone live on JavaFX.com.  This release is deceptively small, but has an enormous number of changes under the hood.  In this post I will take you through the Top 10 major features, giving you background information I learned from working with the JavaFX team, and flooding you with details on interesting tidbits you might otherwise miss.

JavaFX 1.3 Top 10 Features

1. New Controls

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I am pleased to announce the 0.6 release of the open-source JFXtras project, the largest 3rd party library of JavaFX add-ons.  This release is a very large undertaking that represents the work of several dozen contributors over the past 6 months.

JFXtras 0.6 will work with any JavaFX release in the 1.2 family.  We recommend using the very latest release (currently JavaFX 1.2.3), which can be downloaded from JavaFX.com.

Starting immediately, we will be focusing on developing a JavaFX 1.3 compatible JFXtras release.  Our plan is to release a 1.3 compatible version of JFXtras within 1 week of the official release announcement from Oracle.  To hear about future JFXtras release announcements, make sure to follow my blog.

JFXtras Functionality

To make it easier to see some of the JFXtras capabilities in action, I have included Web Start demos from our component test library.  It may take a minute or two to load the first demo, but after that the rest should launch instantaneously.

Data-Driven Controls

The JFXtras controls include a Table, Tree, Shelf, Calendar, PasswordBox, Picker, Spinner, MultiLineTextBox, ScoreBoard, and Menu.  Many of these controls can be driven off a dynamic data provider that gives back incremental results from an asynchronous operation, such as a Web Service call.

XTableView (browse demo source)

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