Person To Watch: Joshua Marinacci

He’s popping up in a few interesting places of late.  He’s been hired by Sun to work on the Swing team and promptly showed up on the WinLAF mailing list to talk about moving their bug fixes to the Windows L&F into the official Swing codebase for release in Mustang (accompanied by talk of how to make it easier for the WinLAF folks to contribute fixes more directly to the Swing codebase.  Then today he turned up on the Mac Java-Dev list asking questions related to making Java apps look right on OS X.  Then of course he’s behind the Flying Saucer pure Java XHTML renderer which is really quite awesome (it was very strict about standards compliance last I checked so should make even Byron happy).

Now I don’t mean to suggest that all these projects are actually Sun related or start unsubstantiated rumors but having followed Joshua’s blog on Java.Net he definitely seems like an excellent addition to the Swing team and I’ll be very interested in seeing how his project of improving the Windows L&F goes.  Hopefully if he keeps asking questions about Mac UIs we won’t see the any more boneheaded assumptions creep into Java like that whole menus go in frames assumption that makes life difficult for Java developers on Mac OS.  Hopefully they’ll be able to use his experience with Flying Saucer to improve the Swing Text APIs HTML support (it’s currently stuck at HTML 3.2).  (Hint: If you’d like to add support for floating DIVs for me that’d save me the trouble…)

That said, there’s already some pretty awesomely talented people on the Swing team and they’ve definitely learnt a lot from the early days of Java so hopefully the new APIs that get added in will be a little more Mac friendly even without Joshua’s help.