Just finished up in the Desktop Java overview session. Good information in there. The summary glosses over some stuff but I think it covers all the important information. The entire session is an overview so it’s really just identifying things that you should look to learn about elsewhere. It looks like some good stuff for Ephox and our user is coming down the pipeline.

Main points:

• Java on the desktop used to be focussed at the enterprise desktop, now it will focus on becoming far more consumer oriented.
• JavaFX is cool.
• Java 6 Update in 1st half of 2008 to include:
  • JRE Detection improvements (funky scripts to get the right JRE installed, seems to bounce off sun.com)
  • Install process improvements (Kernel)
    • Installs just the absolute minimum components of the JRE and then downloads most common components in the background. Installs less used components on demand. Could be great, but could also cause interruptions to users as they work when new components are needed.
  • Quick Starter. Loads Java files into the disk cache at startup or browser startup and tries to keep them there. Not a full JRE running but will probably be as annoying as all those other task bar icons that are wasting resources trying to do the same thing. No wonder computers take so long to load these days.
  • Windows Graphics Acceleration
    • DirectX 9 based pipeline.
    • On by default so actually useful unlike the OpenGL pipeline which is off because of some driver incompatibilities.
    • High performance for all of Swing and Graphics2D.
    • Nimbus. New cross platform look and feel that’s meant to actually look good. Screen shots look pretty awful (gray is not a good choice of color scheme people!)
• Looking at media improvements in the future.
  • Looks like they want to use native libraries (QuickTime, Windows Media etc) instead of a Java based solution. Seems to be a common trend so hopefully they’ll get it working seamlessly.
• Animation improvements
  • Easy to apply animations and effects.
  • Better timing facilities
• More components
  • Date picker.
  • Native file chooser
  • Ability to mix heavyweight and lightweight components.
  • Non-rectangular top level components
  • Translucent windows
• Applications framework
  • JSR 296
  • Makes it easier to get standalone Swing apps started.
  • Basically just removing boiler plate code, but I suspect it includes more than was shown in the talk.
  • Much, much simpler than something like the NetBeans or Eclipse platforms.
  • Intended to be useful for small to medium size apps instead of the huge apps that NetBeans/Eclipse platforms are good for.
• Beans Binding (JSR 295)
  • new way to bind GUI components to data.
  • Should remove need to know everything about Swing models.
  • http://beansbinding.dev.java.net

Wake up earlier tomorrow. When I got here (about 7:30am) they actively grabbed me to give me the “special present” (4 port USB hub), I couldn’t have avoided it if I’d tried. Now however there are constantly long lines of people lining up to get their present and every so often they’re turned away because they’re “temporarily out of stock, but don’t worry you’ll all get one”.

You don’t have to wake up very early to beat the geek rush, and it does pay off really well.

One of our board members left a comment on Brett’s blog this morning and I love the way it meshes with my thinking that employee blogs is a crucial tool for senior management to keep up with the directions, understanding and thoughts of the rank and file:

Well, my friend I gotta say that whilst reading board papers a link to a blog is a welcome relief. I get the feedback I crave and welcome and also get a general sense of what is on the minds of your team.

Just for the record, RedMonk sucks because they didn’t bring shirts to hand out at their unconference….

They told me to blog it…

I’m sitting here in Auckland airport transitioning through to San Francisco and there’s an interesting synergy to the stuff that’s coming through. First of all, I see that my rash of Twitter subscriptions (my twitter page) and my mentioning twitter in my last post has caused a few people to add me to Twitter and check out my blog.

In turn, at least one of them read a post mentioning Planet Ephox and posted it to their delicious account. That in turn prompted someone else to invite me to CommunityOne (a lead-up event to JavaOne which I’ll try to get to if I can – my flight arrives about 1pm so I’ll miss half of it). What’s most interesting there is that these extra contacts, invites and awareness of Ephox are completely impossible to track. Even if you had a sophisticated cookie system across all the sites involved, you really need to know what the people are thinking to see if you’re having any effect or whether they see good things or bad things etc. If and when you get to the point that someone makes a purchase, there is likely to be a huge range of influencing factors that caused them to get there.

I fly out tomorrow to the US for JavaOne and after that a week working with the team in our US office. I’ll be arriving Monday afternoon US time and fly out Friday the 18th. Being based in Australia (and worse, Brisbane) I don’t get a lot of opportunities to meet tech people so I’m pretty keen to take the opportunity to talk with as many people as I can. So if you’ll be around San Francisco in the next couple of weeks give me a yell. You can email or phone on +1 (650) 292 9659 x717.

In case people are wondering, there was a major failure at our hosting provider which is causing down time. Both this server and the server that hosts the Ephox release blog, LiveWorks!, people.ephox.com and the internal Ephox wiki and JIRA installations have been affected. While (obviously) this site is back up, the Ephox sites didn’t fair so well and are still down.

We’ll get them back up and running as soon as possible. In the mean time, if you see any problems here please let me know. For a short while after the system came back WordPress switched to the default theme (but with all other settings in tact) so I really don’t know what else might have been damaged.

I’ve noticed something I’ve been doing with some consistency lately – when I come across a product that I have some interest in, but can’t or don’t want to start using straight away, I try to add the product page to my RSS feeds. With the proliferation of RSS support in browsers these days it seems to me that every product page should include a link tag pointing to the product updates feed. Ephox doesn’t currently do this, but its something that we should fix pretty quickly to help people find the Releases Blog and stay up to date with all the latest features and fixes.

With a trip to the US coming up, I needed to set up a way to access my work email from my OS X laptop. Last time I went I just used Mail.app to access the Exchange server via IMAP and it worked ok, but obviously had no calendaring ability. This time round I really need the calendar to work as well so I fired up Entourage.

Going through the set up was a bit tedious and I thought it pretty dodgy that it wanted the Outlook Web Access (OWA) URL – obviously it goes via that instead of the normal exchange protocols. As it turns out though, that’s the way that the Exchange server hosting company recommends you access your email. In fact, the instructions for setting up Outlook on Windows include a series of complex maneuvers to get it to use OWA too. Indeed, Entourage seems just as capable a client as Outlook at least form early impressions. The only thing I miss is the SpamBayes integration and that’s not really a feature of Outlook.

Back in the days prior to OS X, I used to run Linux on the desktop (dual booting with OS 9) and used Window Maker. Since then I’ve used Linux a fair bit but only on servers – I have all the UNIXy goodness I need in OS X. I’ve just looked into setting up another Linux desktop system to see how viable it is and found that Window Maker still hasn’t made it to a 1.0 release – in fact, it hasn’t seen an update since 2005.

I mentioned the other day that I was having trouble with OutOfMemoryErrors being thrown when there shouldn’t have been any references left around. We’ve done a fair bit more investigation into the cause of this and have wound up reporting a bug to Sun (still awaiting review so it’s not in the public bug database yet). It turns out that you can cause OutOfMemoryErrors with an applet as simple as the one below if you just refresh the page a few times – but apparently only if you’re using a dual-cpu or dual-core system.

It seems every time I do some work integrating EditLive! I find a new technique that makes it easier, simpler and more future proof. It’s not so much inventing new patterns as finding creative ways to apply them.

For instance, tonight I wanted to get the upload manager in WordPress working with my EditLive! WordPress plugin. There’s a whole bunch of logic and implementation detail in the JavaScript that WordPress outputs and it expects the editor to be TinyMCE. Fortunately, earlier on the plugin had drugged TinyMCE, taken it out back and shot it1, so it wasn’t available. Fortunately, it’s pretty straight forward to create an adapter for the TinyMCE runtime api that works with EditLive! and drop it in by assigning it to window.tinyMCE. Simple stuff and very similar to techniques I’ve used in other situations, but extremely powerful and easy to not think of. In fact, I’d tied into the autosave by manipulating JavaScript classes and all that became redundant now that I have the TinyMCE adapter.