I put out an April Fools’ post yesterday about joining NASA to help with exploration of the big red planet.  That post was not far from the truth…  all the details about technologies developed by NASA were 100% accurate.  Heck, even the fact that I quit my job was the truth!  The only part that was not true was the company that I will be joining.

While working for NASA to help explore Mars would be a very cool gig as well, I am joining another big red entity that you might be familiar with…

I was initially skeptical about joining Oracle, but have been won over by their commitment to moving forward the Java platform that they have demonstrated over the past 2 years.  For example:

Oracle released Java 7 on schedule in only 1 year

This is something that Sun had been unable to accomplish in the 3 years preceding the merger, and had historically struggled with.

Hudson and OpenOffice have been freed

While the community outcry around the Jenkins and LibreOffice project splits made all the headlines, the ensuing freeing of these platforms by Oracle in which they donated the code to the Eclipse and Apache Foundations, respectively, was not nearly as well publicized.

Oracle saved JavaFX 2

Sun lost touch with their developer base, and built a platform that was inaccessible to Java developers and didn’t meet the needs of business client applications.  Oracle turned this around by rewriting all the APIs in pure Java, adding a much-needed focus on desktop business applications, and shipped JavaFX 2.0 on time!

For these reasons and more, I am glad to have the opportunity to continue to drive Java forward from the inside out.  In fact, not only am I going to be joining Oracle’s Java evangelism team, but at the same time they also recruited Jim Weaver, my friend and co-author on the Pro JavaFX 2 Platform title.  So what can we infer from the hiring of two JavaFX gurus like Jim and myself?

For one, JavaFX is here to stay as a part of the Java platform.

With the 2.0 release, JavaFX finally has the performance, Java language support, and business focused controls to be a worthy successor to Swing.  This is good news to those companies who have a heavy investment in Swing, because they have a path forward to continue developing mission critical business applications on the highly robust JVM platform.  Also, with the new JFXPane component that allows embedding of JavaFX applications in Swing, it is easy to begin incorporating JavaFX elements in existing web applications.

Also, JavaFX has the potential to be a driving force in cross-platform mobile application development.

Right now you have to choose between with the limited functionality, poor usability, and device incompatibility of web-based cross-platform frameworks or the high cost of writing multiple native applications.  I had high hopes that Flash would fulfill the gap between these two approaches, but Adobe fumbled he ball.  Fortunately, JavaFX has shown great promise in this area with some impressive technology demos at JavaOne, and has the opportunity for a touchdown with a business-focused release of JavaFX 2 on mobile.

I am optimistic about the future of Java and JavaFX technology in the coming years, and in my new role will be in a good position to give all of you a front row seat.  Expect plenty of blogs, articles, demos, and the usual satiric, but realistic, developer viewpoint on the Java platform as I dig my heels in at the big red giant!

This was an April Fools’ spoof — everything is factual except the company I joined.  Read more here.

Just in the past year I lead the OSCON Java conference, wrote a new book on Android Flash, and also put out an update to Pro JavaFX 2.  A lot of rumors have been flying around about what the next big thing for me will be, especially since I just quit my job this past week!  Well, time to put the speculation to rest and announce my new gig at the NASA Ames Research Center.

“…time to put the speculation to rest and announce my new gig at the NASA Ames Research Center.”

NASA actually already has quite a bit of Java in use internally at NASA today.  You may not know that the command and control systems for many of the mars rovers, including the Spirit and Opportunity, use Java technology to send instructions to the remote robots as well as analyze the data coming back and construct 3D views for the navigation software used in the control center. After 8 years on the planet, the Opportunity is still going strong, collecting data on Mars craters and seasons, and bringing back priceless images from the red planet.

NASA is so reliant on Java technology that they are also active contributors to the open-source community.  The newer K-9 rover has even more use of Java technology, for which they developed a tool called Java PathFinder in order to identify and eliminate software errors. This is actually an open-source project that you can use in your own application development to trace through different bytecode paths and identify and debug potential deadlocks or exceptions. One of the main features is the ability to deliver not just a stack trace where the error occurred, but the entire execution path that lead to that error.

Recent advances in Java make it a great platform for doing the sort of mission-critical work that NASA needs.  Embedded Java offers a compact, reliable platform for building Java applications on a variety of hardware platforms that are efficient and robust enough to be used in unfavorable conditions such as space and planetary exploration.  The Java EE platform is the industry standard for server technology, and provides a number of reliable, fault-tolerant communication transports that can speed up and data transmission and analysis for researchers worldwide.  And the part I am most excited about is JavaFX technology, which is a modern UI toolkit for developing rich client applications that can incorporate business controls, data charting, media playback, and even 3D.

“JavaFX … is a modern UI toolkit for developing rich client applications that can incorporate business controls, data charting, media playback, and even 3D.”

So you might be wondering why NASA has so much investment in Java and not web technologies like HTML5 and Javascript…  Well, let’s imagine an alternate world where Javascript and web applications were the way we did space exploration:

Swigert: ‘Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.’
Houston: ‘This is Houston. Say again please.’
Lovell: ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a 404 error.’

“Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a 404 error.”

Needless to say, I am glad to be working on Java, and taking it to new heights at NASA!

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!

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

Read the rest of this entry »

I am pleased to announce that we have a couple new videos available on the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group (SvJugFx) video site. Here is a link to the landing page where you can watch these videos as well as all our previous sessions:

http://web.ubivent.com/svjugfx.html

The first new video is a Hands-On JavaFX Lab given by Stuart Marks, core JavaFX team member, and regular SvJugFx attendee. This was our most successful meeting so far for the local audience, because it filled in the gap between the very technical rich presentations we started with and the experience level of the attendees. The entire flood tutorial was published as an HTML document, but it is much more entertaining to see Stuart do it first hand:

Hands-on JavaFX:  http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:210

The second was the wildly popular Bay Area JUG Round-Up event.  All the Bay Area user groups cooperated to host a massive event with a live recording of the Java Posse.  Oracle sponsored the event, with an introduction by Justin Kestelyn and update on Java.net from Sonya Barry.  And of course the Java Posse did an amazing job working the crowd with some hilarious techie humor.

Justin Kestelyn: http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:217,goto:v:-0

Sonya Barry: http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:217,goto:v:-1

The Java Posse: http://jnlp.ubivent.com/jnlp/eventid=10/guest=1/path=doc:129,doc:128,doc:217,goto:v:-2

For our meeting next month we have the esteemed Max Katz coming to speak on Enterprise JavaFX.  He will demonstrate how to use the open-source Flamingo framework to connect a JavaFX application to an enterprise backend using JBoss Seam.  For those of you who don’t know, Exadel also develops an Eclipse plug-in for JavaFX, which he will be using for all his coding examples.  It should be an exciting event, so please sign-up to attend in person or online:

Enterprise JavaFX with Max Katz:  http://www.svjugfx.org/calendar/13605800/