Steve On Java

This past week I had the opportunity to attend JavaOne India, and in my opinion it was even better than last year.  I was speaking together with Kevin Nilson, leader of the SV Web JUG, and he commented on what a great venue that had for the event, which was easily able to hold 2000+ attendees.

Walking around the event, you could appreciate how much passion there was for Java development in India, with a diverse group of attendees that included students, professional developers, and Java community members.  Yara Senger, who came all the way from Brazil to speak about Java home automation with jHome, was impressed with the large number of women developers attending the conference.

The session that Kevin and I gave was an updated version of our HTML5 and JavaFX talk.  Since we last gave this at Devoxx, we were able to add some exciting info about Bootstrap, which is a new JavaScript framework developed by Twitter that has surpassed both jQuery and node.js in activity.  Definitely worth a look if you are developing responsive UIs in JavaScript!

Here is the full presentation deck (which you can also download by going to SlideShare):

For the finale of the presentation, which showed a Conference Tour application that shows how simple it is to mix JavaFX and HTML5 into a single, interactive application.  The whole user interface is rendered using JavaFX including the Accordion control and the Reflection effect, while the map itself is an embedded WebView that makes use of Google Maps.  By clicking on any of the conference locations in the Accordion, it automatically centers on that application in the map showing you where you can find some of the most amazing Java conferences throughout the world!

To run the project yourself, you can download the source code and open it in NetBeans or your favorite IDE.

The code for both the JavaFX UI and Google Maps component is under 150 lines, so this is definitely something you could develop yourself.  Feel free to take the code and leverage it in your own JavaFX/HTML5 hybrid projects as a starting template, and let us know what sort of cool applications you are able to build!

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!

My Devoxx university session yesterday was packed, which was awesome!  It was 3 hours of hard-core JavaFX knowledge, and almost everyone stayed for the duration.  Aaron Houston got a great shot of the venue (more on the Java Champions site):

I posted my slides on SlideShare, so check it out when you get a chance.  Special thanks to my co-authors, Jim, Weiqi, and Dean for help with the content.

For those of you at Devoxx, I also posted a new LearnFX question.  Please launch it with the link below and respond before or during my conference session tomorrow at 1:30PM to be eligable to win a prize!

More updates after my conference session tomorrow!

Last night I presented at the SDForum Java SIG to a very engaged and enthusiastic crowd.  This was the longest presentation to date, but the audience was great, and even stayed afterwards to ask questions.  Also, Rich Rein was an outstanding host, inviting us out to drink beers until midnight after the event (I hope his wife wasn’t upset!)

This is my last presentation gig until Devoxx at the end of the year, but I was able to get a great screencast recording of the session, which you can watch in full resolution on blip.tv:

Note: The end of the presentation got cut off due to a technical glitch in Camtasia, but to their credit it recovered the bulk of the recording on restart.

You can also browse the slide decks at your own pace in PDF format:

Part A (JFXtras): SuperchargingWithJFXtras-SDForum

Part B (WidgetFX): SuperchargingWithWidgetFX-SDForum

I hope you enjoy the video and slides!

I will be presenting at the Oakland Java SIG on July 15th.  The topic is “Supercharging Your JavaFX Programs with WidgetFX and JFXtras,” and will include some brand new content based on the WidgetFX 1.2 and JFXtras 0.5 releases.

As usual, I will incur some significant demo risk for the sake of showing some jaw-dropping demo awesomeness!  You will either be totally impressed or get a good laugh at my expense…

If you are in the SF Bay Area, be sure to drop by and check it out!