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"

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"
  "Scapigliata\", which is simple and has nice emphasis"
  "of the figure's 'Visage'."
}

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.

Speaking at JavaOne was challenging, but fun this year. With the surprise announcements about JavaFX 2.0 there wasn’t a lot of time to respond, but I managed to refocus all my talks in a very short amount of time.

Pro JavaFX Platform – Building Enterprise Applications with JavaFX

My second talk on Tuesday with Jim Weaver was packed to the brim with folks eager to ask questions about the new direction.  We managed to both hit our original presentation topic about enterprise JavaFX development as well as distill the new JavaFX 2.0 market pitch down to something that makes sense to developers.  As an added bonus we threw in some examples of what the new JavaFX APIs could look like from Scala code.

Download Pro JavaFX Platform Presentation as a PDF

JFXtras – JavaFX Controls, Layout, Services, and More

The JFXtras BOF was standing room only with a lot of very prestigious folks from the desktop community filling the chairs.  We covered the latest JFXtras 0.7 features and updated everyone on the plan for the future of JFXtras in light of the JavaFX 2.0 announcement.  At the end of the presentation we announced a new language project called Visage to fill the gap left by JavaFX Script (more on this in a future post).

Download JFXtras Presentation as a PDF

Even if you couldn’t attend, hopefully you can get a flavor for how the talks went by skimming the above presentations.

See you at JavaOne next year!

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.

.

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

Thomas Kurian announced a strategy to open source the JavaFX controls going forward.  This is a huge move in the right direction for the platform, and will make life for us third-party control developers much better!  Even though this is not the full platform open sourcing that I have been petitioning for (thanks for all your support!!!), I will still take some of the credit. 

JavaFX 2.0 Proposed Roadmap

Oracle has published a proposed roadmap for JavaFX 2.0 in the 2011 timeframe.  There are some really great things included, many of which I have been campaigning for:

• Multithreading Improvements – The move to Java APIs breaks down some of the barriers to multi-threaded programming that were present with JavaFX.  Presumably a similar model to Swing will exist where you can launch worker threads, but still have to do all UI operations on a main event thread.
• Texture Paint – Interesting to see this highlighted, but its use in JavaFX was pioneered by Jeff Friesen and included in JFXtras 0.7.
• Grid Layout Container + CSS – Very good to see that they are taking the Grid Layout and evolving it.  The addition of making it accessible from CSS will make it an extremely powerful layout container suitable for multiple uses.
• HD Media – Media seems to be getting a big upgrade, which has been long overdue.  This is in addition to other promised improvements in full screen capabilities, media markers, animation synchronization, and low latency audio.
• HTML5 WebView – It is good to see that this is finally getting the attention it deserves.  JavaFX is great for dynamic application development, but is not well suited for content presentation.  The combination of JavaFX + HTML5 will greatly expand the range of applications that can be developed.
• Controls Galore! – TableView, SplitView, TabView, and Rich Text to name a few.  This is a necessity to build robust enterprise applications.
• File (and other) Dialogs – This may seem like a minor point, but is incredibly important for building real applications.

HTML5 Support

Not to be confused with the WebView, there is also a plan for the successor to JavaFX 2.0 (2012 timeframe) to support an alternate HTML5 rendering pipeline.  Not many details are available about this yet, but it could be a huge technological breakthrough if they are able to pull it off successfully.  The practical applications of being able to deploy your JavaFX application to any HTML5 compliant device is enormous.

.

The Casualties:

JavaFX Script

JavaFX Script was good to us, but it is no longer a go forward technology for Oracle.  I am a bit disappointed about this move, because it takes away a lot of the productivity benefits that have made JavaFX code a joy to write.  However, many of the promised improvements in JavaFX 2.0 are around language features of JavaFX Script (such as binding and sequences), so hopefully they can maintain some of the benefits.

Richard Bair added a very insightful post on his blog, which goes into more details on the language changes and is well worth a read.

JavaFX Mobile

JavaFX Mobile has not seen a lot of action since JavaOne 2009 and the mobile focus in the keynote was on JavaME and LWUIT.  I am still a big fan of the “write once, run anywhere” mantra, and am waiting for this to return to the mobile space.  With the proliferation of different mobile programming models (Android, iPhone, WebOS, etc.), whoever solves the mobile cross-platform development problem in a technically solid way will profit immensely.

.

What’s Next?

Now that Oracle is done with their announcements, I have some of my own.  If you are at JavaOne, drop by my Wednesday session entitled “JFXtras: JavaFX Controls, Layouts, Services, and More” at 2:15 to hear it firsthand, or wait for my blog post shortly following that.