Cognoware Musings

“ Dr Patel is charged with the grievous bodily harm of Mr Vowles following a bowel operation.

» The Calculation US Bankers showed Bush to prove they needed $700 Billion Bailout

“

Where there is love, caring and concern and a lack of strife then one is likely to find true happiness, even if the dwelling is a mere shanty.

Of course, indoor plumbing and clean running water is a definite plus.

— Coot (in the comments)

“ You’re probably thinking to yourself “Wow! That’s a lot of news!”, and you’d be right!

—

General Manager, Windows Product Management at Microsoft on new Virtualized Desktop options.

You are now provided with different options of running enterprise OS within a virtual environment on Employee-owned machines ($110 per year), Contractor machines ($110 per year), Employees who work from home occassionally ($23 per year) or even third-party hosted servers.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that Open-Source allows you to do what ever you want with software, unless explicitly disallowed. Proprietary software forbids you to do what you want with software, unless explicitly allowed.

“

Java.net is disconnected with reality. For every guy who knows Swing/Java there are a 1000 guys who know HTML/DOM/CSS/Javascript. Silverlight is only marginally important because Microsoft controls 90 percent of the desktop marked and is the company behind C#.

JavaFX will ride the JRE in the same way AIR is riding Flash and PDF. So it’s not irrelevant. The problem is that most Java developers don’t know jack shit about developing user interfaces.

— Jan Erik

» Why JavaFX Should Be Inlineable with HTML

August 18, 2008 Ask the (JavaFX) Experts

http: //java.sun.com/developer/community/askxprt/sessions/2008/jl0818.jsp
me: What is the long term future of javafx.ext.swing.* classes in JavaFX's
technological roadmap? Are new Node-based ui classes in-the-works to supercede this?
Joshua Marinacci: We plan to keep the swing classes but they will only be in the desktop profile. New gui classes based on nodes are in the works. These new gui components will be available on all platforms.
me: Currently, there are only a handful of people who are able to skin Swing components, are there plans to make skinning accessible to web developers? I note that a prototype skin design tool exists for Nimbus.
Joshua Marinacci: We have plans for CSS support for skinning.
me: The DropShadow filter is very slow for large objects (e.g. 300x400px), especially for animations. Can we have a flag to switch over to a low-fi version [when] using animations?
Joshua Marinacci: That's an interesting idea. We'll look into it. thanks.
me: It is difficult to write serious web applications if JavaFX doesn't support multiline formatted text. Anything planned in this respect?
Joshua Marinacci: We are working on that as well.
me: How many of these (node based ui components, css) are slated for 1.0? I'm assessing whether there's a market for 3rd party components, and need to know what gaps would already be filled by Sun.
Joshua Marinacci: We don't have a final list yet, but it's going to be just the basics for the 1.0 release. Things like buttons and scrollbars. We won't have more targeted components like you see from the various Swing component vendors. There is definitely a market for 3rd party components.
me: Memory use is still a problem. A JavaFX hello world with Client JVM takes 31Mb of private memory space (jre1.6u7). For comparison purposes, Meebo on DHTML reputedly takes 43Mb, while GMail takes 50Mb on my laptop. I haven't tested any Flex apps. So I have my concerns that using Node-based UI instead of flyweight rendering (as in JTable) will tax the capability of most machines. Last weekend, I drew 65536 rectangles with JavaFX and the JVM ran out of heap space. Will 1.6u10 JavaFX applets load a smaller class library by default?
Joshua Marinacci: We are still doing lots of optimization work. Getting the memory usage down is one of our core concerns.
me: Is the JavaFX interpreter going to be shipped with 1.6u10? Most web hosters support PHP and not java compilers, and that means if the applets can consume JavaFX script, PHP could be used to generate UI. This can help adoption. For example, silverlight supports XAML inlined with HTML.
Joshua Marinacci: The old interpreted version of JavaFX is deprecated. The only way to build JavaFX applications now is to use the compiler. However, it shouldn't matter what your hosting company has. You will compile the JavaFX application on your development desktop computer and only upload the binary jars and html to the website. From the webserver's point of view they are just binary files which are served to the user, the same as images or media files.
me: May I post your response on my blog? http://teyc.tumblr.com/
Joshua Marinacci: absolutely. Thanks for your great questions.

courtesy of wordle.net

» Comparing Animations in Flex vs JavaFX

The video above illustrates how skins and animations are set up in Flex.

JavaFX’s key-frame based timeline animation is richer and more complex, but ironically, I find Flex’s animation more declarative.

For instance, to move a button from A to B in JavaFX, a Timeline has to be crafted to move the element.

In Flex, the programmer declares that when the location of a button changes, the runtime should apply a particular animation (in Flex jargon, this is known as an “Effect”). The kicker though, is that an effect, being an effect can take shortcuts, for instance, rendering an approximation or a representation in order to maintain framerates.

I find the latter easier. A designer would have little problems embellishing or tuning an existing application without altering application logic.

Given that JavaFX language supports multiple inheritance, this feature could probably be implemented via a Mix-In class.