St. Louis λ-Lounge
The inaugural meeting of the St. Louis λ-Lounge was held at Appistry this evening.
More than thirty people came. Alex Miller from Terracotta lead the opening discussion. Matthew Taylor from Spring Source showed two meta-programming techniques in Groovy. Ryan Senior did an introduction to OCaml.
Mark Volkmann will talk about Clojure in the January meeting. Mario Aquino volunteered a talk about writing iPhone applications or Widgets.
The vision of the group is to pull together the people who are interested in alternative languages that won't viably form individual dedicated user groups. Functional programming and dynamic languages are the focal points. Essentially, its a place where we can talk about things like tail-call optimization, closures, continuations, duck typing, meta-programming protocols, type inferences, monads, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem without being ridiculed.
It was a bit long, from 6:00pm to about 9:00pm. But its fun.
Overheard at the meeting:
- Ten years ago, we gathered to get into Java. Now we are getting away from Java.
- XSLT should count as a functional language.
- Is there a web framework for OCaml.
- Can I use your meta-programming techniques to subvert DRM.
- The Office-based joke that I didn't get (something about pennies from accounts.)
- I follow you on twitter. I follow you too.
- I still haven't gotten over the fact that both Symbolics and the LMI went out of business.
Using JavaFX 1.0 On Linux
[Update (Wed Jun 3 07:45:43 PDT 2009)]: As of June 2, 2009, you can download the Linux and Solaris version of JavaFX 1.2 SDK directly from http://javafx.com. The Linux and Solaris support is preview only.[/]
This is a quick update to my Watch JavaFX SDK Run---On Linux post from 121 days ago.
With the preview release, we got an easy pass because zip file versions of the SDK was available from the download site. For the now online JavaFX 1.0, only the Windows installer and the Mac OS X disk image (*.dmg) versions are available.
Fortunately, Linux can deal with Mac dmg files quite easily. Here's what I tried on my Ubuntu 8.10 amd64 box:
- Download The Mac OS X version of JavaFX SDK 1.0 from JavaFX Downloads for Mac and Windows page
- Run bunzip2 to decompress the downloaded javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg
- Mount the result at a directory. The directory will contain many levels of subdirectries and files
- Unarchive on of the files with cpio to get a javafx-sdk1.0 directory
Here's a transcript of my terminal session:
[weiqi@gao:~] $ file javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 100k [weiqi@gao:~] $ bunzip2 javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg bunzip2: Can't guess original name for javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg -- using javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg.out bunzip2: javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg: trailing garbage after EOF ignored [weiqi@gao:~] $ mkdir mount-point [weiqi@gao:~] $ sudo mount -o loop -t hfsplus javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg.out mount-point [sudo] password for weiqi: [weiqi@gao:~] $ mkdir javafx-sdk1.0 [weiqi@gao:~] $ cd javafx-sdk1.0/ [weiqi@gao:~/javafx-sdk1.0] $ gunzip -c ../mount-point/javafx_sdk-1_0.mpkg/Contents/Packages/javafxsdk.pkg/Contents/Archive.pax.gz | cpio -i 65687 blocks [weiqi@gao:~/javafx-sdk1.0] $ ls bin docs LICENSE.txt README.html servicetag THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME.txt COPYRIGHT.html lib profiles samples src.zip timestamp
A little involved, but we got our javafx-sdk1.0 directory. Copy it to the appropriate place like /opt or wherever you install software packages, add the javafx-sdk1.0/bin directory to your $PATH, and you are in business.
As usual, all the pure Java stuff should work.
I'll let you know what I can do when I play a little bit more with it.