Steve On Java

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!

At last night’s Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group event, I announced a petition to Open Source the JavaFX Platform.  This is a petition from the Java and JavaFX Community directed to the management of Oracle Corporation. The goal of the petition is to increase the viability of the JavaFX platform to the benefit of both the community and Oracle.

To the Leaders, Management, and Board of Directors at Oracle Corporation,

We the undersigned formally request that Oracle Corporation release the entire JavaFX Platform as open source software available for modification and reuse by individuals, educators, and corporations.

…We believe that an essential part of the future success of this platform is to release it as open source software. … In our estimation, the increased adoption of JavaFX will make the platform even more profitable for Oracle than it currently is as a proprietary technology.

…read more

This petition has been embraced by community and industry leaders alike.  Here are some quotes from leaders in the JavaFX community:

Jim Weaver
JavaFX holds the potential of bringing back rich-client Java, after fifteen years of force-fitting the Web to be an application execution environment.   Open-sourcing JavaFX and related deployment technologies will help rescue users and developers from continuing to settle for far less than what could be experienced with rich-client Java.

Peter Pilgrim
JavaFX is still a fantastic solution to be portable, cross-platform, a technology which runs across multiple deployment targets: desktop, mobile and other embedded devices and across multiple operating systems. An Open JavaFX will allow innovation to take place outside of Oracle completely and yet I also believe that the repository, the service / provider owner, intellectual property must be paid or monetised as well. I believe that people, individuals, groups and companies will recognise the work of those who innovate. It is possible to monetise JavaFX.

If you adding your name to the list of signatures, please visit the petition signatory page here:

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Sign the Petition

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JavaFX was first announced three years ago at JavaOne 2007.  We would like to be able to present this petition to the management of Oracle at JavaOne on the 3rd event anniversary of this great technology.

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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