I’ve spent the day doing some work with our Alfresco integration to make it easier to install and a bit more maintainable. Fortunately the Alfresco team were kind enough to point me at their Module Management Tool which while being a bit rough around the edges is really quite cool. Basically, it takes the alfresco.war and a zip file containing the module you want to install and shoves the module into the war file, ready to be deployed. What’s particularly cool is that it actually has version management so it knows if it’s previously installed a module or if the installed module is more recent than the one you’re installing etc.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to make wikis accessible to the common man – in other words, how do we get wikis to spread out of the technical departments and make it not just usable by non-technical people but make them actually want to use it and advocate it. Certainly there’s been a lot of movement in this area and a lot of good progress made, but I suspect there’s a lot more than can be done.

One of the things I’ve often found annoying about Brisbane, and to a degree Australia in general, is you just don’t get enough chance meet ups with interesting geeks. So since I’m over in San Francisco at the moment and Robert Scoble invited everyone and anyone to join Tom Conrad and him on the top floor of the Marriot hotel to watch the fireworks, I figured it was worth the walk.

Turns out that only a few people thought of that particular vantage point so when I got there Tom and Robert had secured the best seats in the house. Conversation was great, both Tom and Robert are very down to earth and easy to get on with. We were saved from getting too geeky by Robert inviting over a couple of girls who hadn’t secured good seats but it was good to see some of the stuff put in perspective and get a non-geeks view on things as well.

I mentioned that I was chatting to a reporter after the Java Libre panel yesterday. The article she wrote is now online and it’s a pretty good summary of the key points of interest in the discussion (it skips all the bits where everyone agreed in true reporter style though). I think she did a pretty good job of understanding what I was attempting to say (I elaborated more on that yesterday). We even got an actual link to ephox.com which is unusual.

There was an interesting panel discussion at JavaOne today about the open sourcing of Java. The panel was made up of folks developing open source JVMs and a representative from Sun. Compatibility is obviously a common theme to these discussions and there were a number of mentions to just how bug for bug compatible the alternative JVMs are trying to be. It occurs to me though that if all the implementations wind up behaving in precisely the same way, there’s not really any point to having multiple implementations. Yes multiple licenses are nice for particular niches but for the average Java developer, what’s the benefit?

The session was a lot more fluff than useful stuff and often went for showy graphics instead of actual usability which is a shame. There were some good ideas though.

• Use a modern L&F – they suggested Nimbus. Gosh it’s ugly and gray. I suggest using the system native L&F (except on Linux and Solaris then anything is an improvement)
• Add a splash screen, can do this with the -splash argument in Java 6.
  • Supports alpha transparency so can be non-rectangular
  • Should provide a progress bar.
    • They used a sepia image fading into color to show progress which looked cool but didn’t really show progress at all effectively.
• Validating Data
  • Give feedback immediately.
  • JGoodies can provide a small icon in the corner of the component. You can do this yourself by painting the icon in the layered pane’s popup layer.
• Custom Components
  • You can improve GUIs by creating custom components.
  • This is where they messed up usability in some places. Make sure your custom components are significantly easier to use than the standard components otherwise it’s better to go with what the user is used to. Also need to consider accessibility which they didn’t mention at all.
• Improve interactivity by updating search results immediately as the user changes values.
• Use cyclic gradients for improved performance, even if you don’t need the cyclic property (just paint one iteration).
• Measure text with:
  • g2.getFotnMetrics() then stringWidth and getAscent
• JList has a setLayoutOrientation method which lets you use it as a multicolumn list.
• You can span text across all the cells in a row by clipping the text with a JViewPort to show just the section inside the cell currently being painted.
• You can animate the changes made when sorting by painting the animation in the glass pane over where the table is.

These are my notes from the technical session, “Being Productive With Swing” by Ben Galbraith. The session focussed a lot on Ben’s library that he’s creating which was a shame but there are some ideas that are worth taking away.

The techniques described below are very specific to business applications that center around forms. At the moment desktop applications are “stepping up the wow” to compete with AJAX and Swing traditionally hasn’t had this – JavaFX is likely to bring this to Swing. However, for most business applications “wow” isn’t a requirement, productivity is. In that area, no emerging platform provides material advantages over Swing with the exception of JFace and Cocoa.

These are my notes from the talk on the Swing Application Framework (JSR296). This is probably my favorite technology I’ve seen at JavaOne so far. It’s not trying to be overly fancy but it solves a clear need in a very simple way.

Malcolm Davis also commented on it but wasn’t impressed. Personally I think he missed the point. Firstly Malcolm, yes Eclipse and NetBeans platforms have had basically all these features and far, far more for a while and that’s the problem. Using Eclipse or NetBeans as a base for a small or medium sized swing app is total overkill and the frameworks are huge and take ages to learn and configure for your needs. JSR296 is all about defining a really simple framework that gives you just the basics. If you need more you can either add on to it or go the whole hog with Eclipse or NetBeans. Malcolm suggested a few areas he thought it should also cover:

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…