Weiqi Gao's Observations - swing tag

It's The People, Stupid!

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:58:57 GMT

The pattern of lead engineer jumping off the Java train continues with Chet Haase, the lead Java client architect, joining Adobe's Flex SDK team.

Eric Burke, over there at Stuff That Happens.com, as usual, has the in depth analysis:

([Update] Eric has since toned down the original wording of the comment and withdrew two out of three frames of the comic, and issued an apology. I have updated my quote accordingly.)

Eric Burke: This is a real XXXX in the XXXX...

Of course, Adobe doesn't think so:

James Ward, commenting on Eric's Comic: Adobe is not trying to kill anyone or anything. We are always looking for great engineers. Chet is a great engineer and we are really happy to have him on board.

Instead of getting all depressed, let me salvage the situation and turn this situation into a fun little Sunday Java People Quiz:

Q: For each of the following former Sun engineers, discuss the importance of their contributions to the Java platform, what prompted them to leave the Java team, and which company, if any hired them away?

Arthur van Hoff
Alan Baratz
Patrick Naughton
The original CAFEBABE
Calvin Austin
Joshua Bloch
Neal Gafter
Gilad Bracha
Peter van der Ahe
Graham Hamilton
Dick Wall (or one of the other Java Posses, I can't tell them apart)
Bill Joy
Ken Arnold
Mary, the lady who use to give out Friday Free Stuff
(Add more in the comments)

The point? Java has survived in the face of all these public high profile separations. It will live on past this one.

Java News Brief (JNB): Building A Complete NetBeans Platform Application

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 15:57:03 GMT

The second installment of Tom Wheeler's NetBeans Platform tutorial is posted to OCI's Java News Brief (JNB). Get it while it's hot.

Direct Manipulation, Emerging Behavior, Untestable Qualities, ...

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 06:01:51 GMT

Tonight's presentation at the St. Louis JUG is by Kyle Cordes, principal of Oasis Digital, and his title is Direct Manipulation User Interfaces with Java Swing.

This is once again one of those talks that you have to attend to appreciate its content. Reading the slides afterwards probably won't do it.

Before the talk Raj Patel asked what the talk is going to be about. The answer I came up with is "writing a Swing application where the users don't enter texts and push buttons." At the opening of the presentation, Kyle also pointed out that he's not talking about Swing drag-and-drop, which is all about negotiating data formats. Nor is he talking about Naked Objects, whcih is all about not writing the GUI.

Kyle spent most of the time in Eclipse, doing demos while going through source code class by class and line by line.

Kyle's thesis is that direct manipulation user interfaces, based on drag-and-droppable on-screen widgets, can provide fast, efficient, intuitive, and appealing data manipulation in your application.

In one of the demos, the screen is populated with small JPanels in a ten row three column grid. You pick up one and move it to a different spot. As you are dragging the JPanel other JPanels make way for it by moving to a different location in an animated fashion. "Wow" was my first reaction.

Then he went through the code. And the code was amazingly simple. It uses Swing features to the fullest extent, but simple. The animation logic is driven by a Swing Timer whose action is simply: hey, each JPanel, check if you should move to a different spot, and if so, move a little bit toward the new spot. The fancy animation is an emerging behavior out of this simple logic. Another "wow" at the source level.

After the talk I asked if he wrote any tests for the code. The answer is no. "How could you write a test for the emerging behavior?" Jeff Grigg put it a different way: "How could you write a test for 'this is fun?' You let the user use it and watch them having fun!"