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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

I’m sitting here in Auckland airport transitioning through to San Francisco and there’s an interesting synergy to the stuff that’s coming through. First of all, I see that my rash of Twitter subscriptions (my twitter page) and my mentioning twitter in my last post has caused a few people to add me to Twitter and check out my blog. In turn, at least one of them read a post mentioning Planet Ephox and posted it to their delicious account.

I fly out tomorrow to the US for JavaOne and after that a week working with the team in our US office. I’ll be arriving Monday afternoon US time and fly out Friday the 18th. Being based in Australia (and worse, Brisbane) I don’t get a lot of opportunities to meet tech people so I’m pretty keen to take the opportunity to talk with as many people as I can. So if you’ll be around San Francisco in the next couple of weeks give me a yell.

In case people are wondering, there was a major failure at our hosting provider which is causing down time. Both this server and the server that hosts the Ephox release blog, LiveWorks!, people.ephox.com and the internal Ephox wiki and JIRA installations have been affected. While (obviously) this site is back up, the Ephox sites didn’t fair so well and are still down. We’ll get them back up and running as soon as possible.

I’ve noticed something I’ve been doing with some consistency lately – when I come across a product that I have some interest in, but can’t or don’t want to start using straight away, I try to add the product page to my RSS feeds. With the proliferation of RSS support in browsers these days it seems to me that every product page should include a link tag pointing to the product updates feed.