It was quite a busy week last week at JavaOne in San Francisco, but it was one of the best JavaOnes I have attended to date despite the disappointing accommodations at the Powell Hotel (No A/C and bed bugs) There were so many interesting sessions lined up that it was hard to choose which ones to attend. I participated on a NetBeans discussion panel as part of NetBeans community day on Sunday before the conference started, and also in a similar panel discussion in a JavaOne general session on Thursday. Listed below are some of the highlights of the sessions that I attended.
JavaFX
If there was one thing that I learned from the sessions that I attended related to JavaFX, its that it will be the UI framework of choice moving forward for desktop and rich Internet applications. Probably more than half the sessions I attended were related to JavaFX in one way or another. Adding rich content to applications such as gradients, translucency, reflections, blurring, animated transitions, etc. that were possible, but very painful to do in Swing are baked into the JavaFX toolkit.
JavaFX UIs can be constructed using a WYSIWYG designer called Scene Builder which is available as a free download from Oracle’s website. The tool supports drag and drop of the various JavaFX widgets onto a JavaFX scene. Scene Builder then generates a .fxml file rather than a Java class, which I feel is the biggest downside to this tool. The FXML can still be used within a Swing component however as I detailed in a previous post here. NetBeans IDE can also be integrated with Scene Builder so that Scene Builder will launch when a .fxml file is clicked within the NetBeans IDE. Below is a screenshot from Scene Builder.
Probably the most interesting session I attended last week was titled “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World”. The presenter (Simon Ritter) went through an example of developing a JavaFX application using the Microsoft Kinect and the OpenNI (Natural Interaction) library which is a Java API for communicating with the Kinect. Ritter demoed a black jack card game written with JavaFX for which he used gestures to interact with the game.
Ritter also demoed an interface with NeuroSky, which is a USB EEG sensor for monitoring brain activity. While it was interesting to see his brain activity plotted with JavaFX chart components and gauge components from Steel Series (located at the JFXtras website), he admitted there wasn’t much practical application for such an interface yet, although it highlighted where things are heading with the future of user interface design.
Here at Lynden we have begun work with designing a new user interface for our Freight Management System (FMS) application using JavaFX on the NetBeans Rich Client Platform, which will give us the best of both worlds. JavaFX for a rich set of UI components, effects and animations and the NetBeans platform which will provide the underlying framework/plumbing for the application including windowing system, menu, tool bar, property sheets, etc.
Anyone interesting in kicking the tires of JavaFX can tryout the Ensemble application which highlights the various UI components, effects and transitions that are possible with JavaFX. There are also open source JavaFX components that can be found at the JFXtras website located here, for which there is also a demo “Ensemble” application as well, highlighting the library’s components.
NetBeans Rich Client Platform (RCP)
The NetBeans RCP made a strong showing at this year’s JavaOne and is gaining momentum as a solid platform to design rich client applications on. In fact, two Netbeans RCP applications won a Duke’s Choice Award this year.
The first application from NATO is called “MICE console” which stands for “MASE Integrated Console Environment” and is used to support the execution of air operations in a real-time environment.
The next application called “AgroSense” is an open-source platform for and by the agricultural sector.
Of particular interest this year was integrating JavaFX components within a Netbeans RCP application which I discussed during my demos for the panel discussions that I participated in. I will be blogging about this further in the near future as we develop our FMS application at Lynden. I’m also working on an automated trading application built on the NetBeans RCP as well, which I would like to incorporate JavaFX chart components as they seem to be far more polished than the current charts that are available through JFreeChart.
Neuroph
I also attended an interesting presentation by Zoran Sevarac regarding a neural network design tool that is written on the NetBeans RCP called Neuroph. The application allows one to quickly design neural networks for such usages such as facial recognition, music classification, predicting poker hands, etc. I will be researching this further to see if neural networks can be used to determine how to best handle the loading/unloading of trailers at our warehouses in order to optimize the time spent moving freight from the inbound trucks to the delivery trucks. I would also like to investigate this in regards to trading stocks/futures/currencies, maybe not as a sole predictor of price movement, but used as aid in an existing trading strategy to help improve performance
Javeleon
Allan Gregersen presented on Javeleon which allows you to apply code changes in a running application immediately, without losing any of the application state. The result is that development time is cut down since the application doesn’t need to be shut down and restarted for every change that you would want to see. We have been using Javeleon for a little over a year now in the development of our NetBeans RCP application and we are able to deploy individual modules to our app running on our development desktop without having to stop this application, thus greatly reducing the amount of time spent waiting to start up the application.
During the demo, Gregersen showed a numer of modifications to a space invaders application that were deployed while the application was running, and also while preserving the application state.
Javeleon supports Swing applications as well as NetBeans RCP applications and has announced support for Java applications servers such as Tomcat, Jetty, and JBoss as well.
Hazelcast
Distributed data made easy is what I walked away with from the Hazelcast presentation. Hazelcast is a lightweight distributed Map (and more) that has a fairly small footprint, a single 1.7MB jar file with no dependencies. There are also a number of other interesting distributed constructs in addition to maps such as, Queues, Sets, Lists, Locks, Semaphores, Topics, and Executor Services. We will be investigating distributed caches at Lynden at some point for storing data for quick retrieval by our FMS client application.
Raspberry Pi
Finally, I attended a very cool demo on the Raspberry Pi which is a small ARM Linux device designed for the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The board is the size of a credit card and includes a 700MHz ARM processor and retails for $25. There a number of articles on getting Java SE Embedded set up and running on the device, which can be found here.
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