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!

I am very pleased to have Amy Fowler (Aim) presenting on JavaFX Layouts at our January Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group (SvJugFx).  For those of you who don’t know Aim, she was a founding member of the Swing team, has done some Rock Star presentations at JavaOne, and is a core member of the JavaFX team focused on all things layout.

If you are doing any JavaFX development at all, this is an event you won’t want to miss.  The presentation is on January 13th and you can sign-up on the SvJugFx website here:

Click to Sign-Up

We will also be streaming the event live from Santa Clara, so if you don’t live nearby make sure to join us online for the event.  I actually think the folks watching it online are at an advantage, because they get all the inside information in the chat window from JavaFX luminaries like Jim Weaver, Dean Iverson, and Jonathan Giles.

For those of you who missed our December event, we just finished posting Richard Bair’s December talk on JavaFX entitled “Intro to JavaFX – A Rich Client Platform for All Screens.”  You can view it on Parleys.com complete with synchronized slides by clicking on the image or link below:

Richard Bair Presenting on JavaFX at the SvJugFx

Click to View Presentation

I hope to see you at our next event!

I am pleased to announce the formation of a new Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group.  While this group is rooted in the SF Bay Area, we also plan to make it easy for remote attendees to watch and participate by doing live streaming of our meetings via USTREAM and allowing remote participation through Google Moderator.

For the initial launch meeting on December 9th we are fortunate to have Richard Bair as the presenter.  For those of you who don’t know him, he is a JavaFX lead developer, JavaOne Rockstar Speaker, has an awesome blog, and will be talking about JavaFX at Devoxx (where I am also presenting).  He is also a great sparring partner on almost any technical topic (speaking from experience), so Q&A should be lots of fun!

The SvJugFx Homepage is on Meetup.com where you can sign up to become a member and register for the December 9th session with Richard:

This is the first JavaFX User Group in the U.S. to my knowledge.  Although Japan has the title of world’s first JavaFX User Group as reported on Jim Weaver’s blog.

Keith Combs and I did a presentation on JavaFX and WidgetFX at Silicon Valley Code Camp this past weekend to a packed room (see below for the slides).  This was my first time visiting SVCodeCamp and I was very impressed…  With a 2 day total of over 1700 attendees, it was the place to be in the Bay Area!

The highlight of our presentation was a new secret project I just finished (literally 1 hour before the presentation started).  It is called the JUG SpinnerWheel, and is a complete rewrite of Jim Weaver‘s classic Java User Group Prize Wheel:

Clearly this is not rigged if I had to spin it 26 times!

The revamped JUG SpinnerWheel includes a pseudo-3d rendered prize wheel, web service integration to meetup.com to retrieve event participants, and a winner display featuring the prototype JFXtras Table component.

We used this for the first time, and successfully gave away 3 copies of the Pro JavaFX Platform book to audience members eager to learn more about JavaFX!

You can find the full slides from the presentation (including details about the web service implementation of the JUG SpinnerWheel) on SlideShare:

Happy JavaFX hacking!