Steve On Java

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 did a presentation at the Agile 2012 conference in Dallas on how to do Agile release planning with distributed teams.  This is something that we struggled with at my last company since we had 300 developers split into 40+ teams in 5 different countries.

I covered a bunch of different topics that matter for facilitators of Agile planning sessions, including budget hardware for video conferencing.  While you can pay for expensive video-presence solutions from Cisco and AT&T, with clever usage of consumer hardware you can achieve pretty good results for a fraction of the cost.  For more details about hardware options for doing virtual planning sessions, my hardware guide to streaming is a good place to start.

This also was an announcement of a new version of the Apropos Portfolio Planning Tool that I did in JavaFX 1.3 and previously open-sourced.  Ravi Buddharaju, one of my former co-workers who is a great Agile coach and Java developer (and leader of the new Hyderabad JUG), did a new version of Apropos based on JavaFX 2.  It is quite a bit faster and much more stable than the old version of the tool, which speaks volumes to both Ravi’s skills and also the maturity of the JavaFX 2 platform.

For more information about the Apropos project, check out the Google code project here (we will post on the front page when the new version of Apropos is checked in):

http://code.google.com/p/apropos/

I just finished a huge speaking engagement at JustJava Brazil. While I have been to Brazil several times before, this was my first time speaking at this event, and it was very impressive. The entire conference is community-run, and had a very good vibe to it with lots of attendees, great content, and a perfect venue to allow interaction and hallway conversations to happen.

I ended up giving 5! talks total… probably the most exhausting conference I have done in a while, but was well worth the effort. I also had a lot of local help from Marcelo Quinta (GOJava) who translated all my talks and Rafael Alfonso (ScalaFX Contributor) who cospoke with me and also was my audience “plant” during the keynote.

Speaking of the keynote, you won’t find that talk anywhere below…  I have been getting bored of scripted talks, so Rafael helped me to have a little bit of fun with it.  You had to be there to appreciate it, but the audience had a lot of fun enjoying the ups and downs as I kept changing the presentation to meet the demanding needs of our Brazilian audience. 

Return of Rich Client Java – Brazil

This was the first talk I gave, and covers JavaFX in general.  I highly recommend trying out some of the demo code by downloading the free code bundle from our book website:

http://www.apress.com/9781430268727

The next talk was a Portuguese version of the 55 New Things in Java 7 deck that Donald Smith originally did for the EclipseCON keynote.  Everyone in the audience (me included) learned something new about Java 7 during the talk, and I guarantee that you will too!

XML Free Programming – Brazil

I did a solo version of the XML Free Programming talk that Arun and I created for JavaOne last year.  Not quite as much fun without a co-presenter, but still got lots of laughs from the audience.

Have you signed the Freedom from XML Petition yet?

JavaFX and Scala – Like Milk and Cookies – Brazil

I also did an updated version of the ScalaFX talk together with Rafael.  He added some great content about the Color Selector control that he created, and added a lot of depth to the presentation since he has been committing code like crazy to the project (think he has me beat on commits by this point).

Crazy JSRs

Finally, this is not a talk that I gave at JustJava, but rather a quickie I put together on Bruno’s request during the community JCP meeting the night before JustJava.  It was a lot of fun to do with the audience, who generated some interesting JSR ideas (several a bit too good to be considered “crazy”).  Feel free to repurpose this talk for your own user group or community sessions to have some fun.

I had a lot of fun at JustJava, but it is time to move on to some of the other communities in Brazil.  Next stop is GOJava in Goiania followed by Brasilia and Salvador.  If you are in any of these locations, feel free to ping me via the Let’s Meetup page.

The JavaOne Session Builder is now up and available for setting up your sessions. If you are not used to the JavaOne ritual, it is always a good idea to sign-up for sessions well in advance so you don’t get bumped out of the more popular ones. This also helps them fix the room allocation so popular talks get the right size room.

I put together my own schedule of all the JavaFX-related content I plan to attend, and published it on Google Calendar. It is also a pretty good guide to some of the top JavaFX content that is being featured at JavaOne this year. — Apologies to my fellow speakers with conflicting session slots. I wish I could be in multiple places at once, but even rich client technology is not that advanced — yet.

Note: Click for details — sessions I am actually giving are highlighted in green.

Also, for those of you brave enough to attempt to use the schedule builder, it is no simple feat. The UI is fairly convoluted, so getting your schedule tweaked to be just right takes a lot of time and experimentation. Fortunately, I did a lot of this work for you and have figured out the happy path through the system.

JavaOne Schedule Builder Happy Path:

1. Login to the system and go to the JavaOne Content Catalog
2. Setup your filters to get the sessions you want (if you are reading this, you probably want to search on “javafx”)
3. Click on the stars to pick the sessions you are interested in — this adds them to the “My interests” list
4. Finally, click on “Schedule My Interests” and follow the little wizard UI

Just about any other path through the system (scheduling by time, resolving conflicts as you add sessions, etc.) is fraught with peril, so be warned.

Enjoy, and I hope to see you at JavaOne!

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the Chennai Java User Group during my trip to India.  I was expecting a small group of very devoted Java fans; however, I was surprised to walk into a room of over 200 developers eager to learn about JavaFX 2.0.  The venue was very impressive with rows of workstations that we later used for a lab, as well as plenty of seating.

Chennai User Group Venue at Tenth Planet

Also, Raj was a great host, and both he and the folks at Tenth Planet went completely over the top with this event.  This included:

• A life-size poster with the event details
• An ornamental flower arrangement with the event details
• Two gifts presented at the conclusion of the talk

Life-Size Event Poster

The session ran from 10AM through 4:30PM with a break for lunch in the middle.  When half the hands went up for returning after lunch, I didn’t believe most of them would be back, but we easily had 60% of the folks back in their seats by the time we were ready to start.

If you are interested to see the slides from the talk, you can find them on Slideshare here:

Thanks again to the folks in the Chennai JUG for being great hosts!

One of my coauthors on the upcoming Pro Android Flash title, Oswald Campesato, and I had the pleasure of speaking to the San Francisco Android User Group.  It was a packed audience with around 150 eager Android developers who wanted to hear how they could use Flash on their devices (they were a great audience).  Here is what some of them had to say about the meetup:

• 
  Alec Dara-Abrams

  Stephen and Oswald gave a very good over view of Flash development on Android. Like a number of other SF Android speakers, packing the hour or so with the right level of technical detail. Thanks to them also for being responsive to audience questions – not so easy I’d guess with 100+ people out there past the lighting for the video. I’m looking forward to following Stephen’s blog.

• 
  Drew Dara-Abrams

  Stephen and Oswald gave a good overview of the current state of Flash on Android. Unfortunately the Adobe tools and their book won’t be out until spring, but I appreciated all the working examples of code that Stephen demonstrated. I’ll definitely look for their book when it comes out.

• 
  Francisco Carretero

  Looks like an incredibly useful topic for android for giving android that push to the next level.

As I promised folks in the audience, here is a copy of the full presentation.  Lots of this information was added very recently from different chapters in our book, so it is definitely the latest and greatest source of information on what you can do with Flash on mobile devices:

I will be posting examples from the book on this blog over the next few weeks.  Please follow my blog if you are interested to see the latest examples of Flash Android capabilities.

I did my JavaFX Alternative Languages talk at Devoxx and will soon be presenting it at JavaOne Brazil (December 7-9th).

During the Devoxx talk I was honored to have Martin Odersky in the audience (for those of you who don’t know him, Martin is the man behind Generic Java and now Scala).  There were several great questions at the end of the talk, one posed by Martin himself.

The question was around this Scala code fragment:

def timeline = new Timeline {
  repeatCount = INDEFINITE
  autoReverse = true
  keyFrames = List(
    new KeyFrame(50) {
      values = List(
        new KeyValue(rect1.x() -> 300),
        new KeyValue(rect2.y() -> 500),
        new KeyValue(rect2.width() -> 150)
      )
    }
  )
}

He was wondering why I had the extra parenthesis after the variables (x, y, and width).  In Scala using parenthesis is optional for methods and allowed for variables, so it appears to be a style issue.  However, there is a good reason for this.

The current JavaFX property model has 4 helper methods for each variable:

• int getX() – Standard JavaBeans getter function for the property x.
• setX(int x) – Standard JavaBeans setter function for the property x.
• static PropertyReference X() – A static function that returns a property reference for x that can be used to refer to this field.
• ValueBinding x() – A member function that returns a mutable reference to x that can be used to get or set the value dynamically.

So the extra parenthesis were to differentiate between a normal method call (“x”) and a ValueBinding (“x()”).

By popular demand at the earlier SvJugFx Event, I also added in some new content demonstrating usage of the Fantom language for coding JavaFX. Besides being extremely easy to create DSLs in, it also has a built-in Duration operator, making the end result extremely similar to the equivalent JavaFX Script:

Here is the full talk on alternative languages with all the updates for the latest conceptual JavaFX 2.0 APIs:

If you are going to be at JavaOne Brazil, please drop me a line and I will be happy to meet up and chat about JavaFX futures.

We did a double header meeting in the North and South bay to kick off the Flash On group. It was a lot of work to coordinate and present back-to-back meetings, but it all came together. A big thanks to my co-presenter Oswald Campesator, my co-coordinators Keith Sutton and Justin Webb, and also, Nick Turner, from Plug and Play’s Mobile Meetup, who did an outstanding job on Thursday evening.

Here is what some of our new members had to say:
Tony Constantinides
“ Great meetup and very informative. Many good issues were raised at the meeting by developers which will lead to a followup meetup which will be hands-on hopefully. With Mobile nothing beats hands on with the fun devices! The possibilities of Android development with TV, tablets and mobile seem endless! ”

Drew Dara-Abrams
“ A useful introductory presentation and discussion. The mix of formal presentation and informal question and discussion worked well. ”

.

Aaron Tong
“ This was a great meetup! Lets have more of the same! ”

.

As promised, here is the presentation that Oswald and I gave (skip to page 30 for the links):

If you haven’t already, sign up for the Flash On meetup group to get informed of upcoming events:
http://www.meetup.com/flashon/

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!

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"

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    url: "http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/"
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  description: "Speaking of Visage, I am looking for"
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  "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!