Java

Sorry this blog has been pretty stagnant lately. Things have been totally crazy. I’ve been touring the country speaking at Java User Groups and other conferences. The JUGs have been really fun. It’s amazing to see how quickly the Java crowd falls in love with Flex, like I did a few years ago. There are still more JUGs, conferences, and eSeminars coming up so please check out the schedule and see if I happen to be in your home town sometime soon. If you will be around the Bay Area for JavaOne, we will be throwing a huge bash with Bruce Eckel. The details are still being finalized, but stay tuned. Also coming in October is the annual Adobe developer conference, called MAX. It will be full of top notch Flex sessions by many of our star engineers. Definitely not something you want to miss. In May I’ll be doing a triple header in Vegas; Las Vegas Adobe User Group, Nevada Java User Group, and Interop. Hopefully some of these events are in your home town since I’d love to meet you all in person!

Yesterday was an exciting day! Bruce Eckel and I hosted an eSeminar about Flex & Java. We had a few technical difficulties, but overall it was very good. You can watch the recording here:

https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a227210/p16565134/

Bruce and I have a few more eSeminars coming up, find out more info here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

Also yesterday the Open Source Buni Meldware Communication Suite joined the Java.net community. This is a great step forward for the project, which uses Flex for it’s Webmail client. More info from Andy Oliver:

I’m working on a project that compiles 11 Flex applications. My Ant build file was getting pretty messy and I was continually commenting out files that I didn’t want to build. By using an Ant macro and some uptodate trickery I was able to significantly decrease my build times when I am only updating files for a single application. The macro also helped to make the build much more manageable.

Tonight I’m speaking at the BayCHI / SV JUG in Mountain View - Starts at 7pm, but you need to either get there early or pre-register if you haven’t already done so.

Bruce Eckel on “Hybridizing Java” with Flex

Screencast of Bruce Eckel and I creating an expressive application using Flex, Hibernate, and XFire

Christophe Coenraets’s new Tomcat based Flex Test Drive

New Yahoo Group just for us Java Flexcoders

Back in the day Swing was so cool because you could make your app look like a napkin. Of course most of us don’t think much about desktop apps or applets anymore, so the Napkin craze faded away. But I’m here to say that The Napkin Skin is back and better than ever! And now it’s based on web technology that people actually have and use. For more info about how Eylon Stroh created this work of art, check out his blogs:

This Thursday night you can meet the Flex team at the SF Adobe office. Come and hang out with the people who actually write classes like UIComponent (8406 lines), Container (5055 lines), and DataGrid (4884 lines). And you can also meet people who have never written an AS class longer than 100 lines - like me! Get all the details and RSVP:

http://flexteam.eventbrite.com/

Also coming up February 7th I am presenting on Sexy Web Apps with Java, Mozilla Tamarin, and Flex in Mountain View.

The buzz around Flex at JavaPolis last week was unreal. It’s great to see so many Java developers get excited about the sexy UIs you can so easily build with Flex! I even had numerous people approach me throughout the week and show me some cool Flex app they built in their first day of Flex programming. Java developers everywhere are falling in love with Flex!

All the Flex / JavaPolis blogs not listed on my previous post:

Christoph Rooms and I have been showing off Flex all week at JavaPolis. Everyone is loving it! Check out the crowd of people watching demos and winning shwag (click the image below to see more pictures from JavaPolis):

Also we have had numerous people blogging about Flex at JavaPolis:

• JavaPolis - Building Sexy Web Apps with Flex
  • POJO Mojo and Sexy Flex
    • Flex at JavaPolis
      • Flex at JavaPolis 2006

        • James Ward and Christoph Rooms at JavaPolis

        This week at the conference Jon from BEA even built a Flex app with vi and the free Flex SDK! Nice work Jon!

What more could a nerd want? Next week I will be at JavaPolis talking about Building Sexy Web Apps. Attendees will receive a free Flex Edition Rubik’s Cube! The first person to solve theirs will win an iPod nano! Then on Thursday at 4:10pm, bring your Flex Edition cubes to the Adobe booth for speedcubing madness! Fastest speedcuber gets an iPod nano! If I still have any cubes left on Friday, you will also be able to get them at either of my sessions; Adobe Flex 2.0 & Java : RIA for the Enterprise or Flex 2.0 @ Work in combination with Spring and Hibernate. Better start practicing your speedcubing! These Flex Edition cubes are much harder than regular Rubik’s cubes! See you in Antwerp!

Last week while many of us were gallivanting around Vegas at MAX, Oracle was holding their OpenWorld conference in San Francicso. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to be in two places at once, so I didn’t attend OpenWorld. But I did have the opportunity of building a Flex demo for one of the Oracle keynotes. I really just took a few of our sample applications and portalized them. You can see the end result on Oracle’s Portlet Testing Site. One cool thing to point out is that the portlets are actually remote portlets being served via Oracle’s JPDK. In case you want to play around with these portlets in your own portal, the provider url is: http://www.jamesward.org:8888/flexportlets/providers/flex_portlets