David Qiao's Blog

Just back from San Francisco for JavaOne. It is great to meet many friends and see some JIDE users during the conference. The slide for my TS is below. Will see you next year!

Slide for JavaOne 2009 – Bringing JTable to the Extreme

Just read an interesting news that Sun charges for the support when using the new GC called G1. Sun always had trouble making money from Java. With Oracle’s influence, things will change. I am looking forward to finding out what announcement it will be on next Tuesday during JavaOne general session.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/05/29/1711203/Java-Gets-New-Garbage-Collector-But-Only-If-You-Buy-Support?art_pos=1

It will be JavaOne next week. It had been a great experience in the last couple of years as I got a chance to meet many old and new friends each time. I will present a TS and a BOF this year.  See the schedule below.

• TS-4706 Bringing JTable to Extreme, June 6, 2009, Friday 13:30 to 14:30, Hall E 135 Moscone
• BOF-4707 JideFX: Bring Desktop Richness to the Internet, June 5, 2009, Thursday 18:30 to 19:20,  Hall E 135 Moscone

Hope you can make them. Otherwise, please drop me an email at david @ jidesof.com if you want to meet during the conference. I am looking forward to meeting you in person.

I got a technical session for JavaOne 2009 to talk about JTables. I knew JTables and JIDE Grids are used very widely among JIDE customers. So I am very eager to collect some screenshots from real applications to show what tables look like in the real world. It doesn’t have to be JIDE Grids. It could be a JTable with customization or JXTable or your own table component. I will dedicate a few minutes from the session to show those screenshots to the audience. I will of course give the credit to you. If you are interested, please email me david at jidesoft.com. I am looking forward to hearing from you!

As I mentioned before, I had an interesting BOF session for the this year JavaOne. The title is “Workaround Swing Bugs”. Even though it was conflicted with the afterdark party, there was still a decent number of people showed up. Since several people asked for it, I post the slides and the demo source code below.

Slides for BOF-5133
Demo Souce Code for BOF-5133

This is something Java/Swing community has been crying for years. We even received numerous requests to make such a component (and we declined all requests). That’s a lightweighted Swing component for html viewing (or editing). JDIC gave us some hope several years ago even though it is JNI based but that’s project went nowhere. There was no indication that Sun is working on it, until the first day of JavaOne when a JWebPane component was announced. Surprise! The demo looked pretty good. It is just there is no demo for public to play with at the moment. I am certainly eager to give it a try when it is avaialble in June or July.

For those whose are interested in it, the author just posted a blog on it.
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/ixmal/archive/2008/05/introducing_jwe.html

It is JavaOne time again this week. Even though I talked with many of you in emails or over the phone but never met in person. If you will be in San Francisco for this year JavaOne, let’s see if we can meet! I will have a BOF-5133 on Thursday night from 8:30 to 9:20 PM at Hall E 135. The topic for the BOF “Workaround Swing Bugs”, which is coincidentally something we are doing all the time. So please come and join me during that time. If you want to schedule another time to meet, you can email me at david at jidesoft.com and suggest a time. I will check email and will be in Moscone Center most of the time during the day. Enjoy and Have Fun at JavaOne!

Last week was a busy week for me. I was at San Jose attending Desktop Matters conference. It was just great. Thanks for Ben and Dion organizing it. I met so many people face to face for the first time although we emailed a lot in the past. In this conference, I announced that JIDE will open source JIDE Common Layer within next month. Here are some details.

JIDE Common Layer is a layer on top of Java Swing. When we developed all the JIDE components, we found that there were many missing features in Swing. Thus we created a JIDE Common Layer and included all those missing features. More and more features were added to this layer as we built more products.  All other JIDE products heavily depend on this JIDE Common Layer. JIDE never sell this JIDE Common Layer separately. All JIDE customers get this layer (the jide-common.jar) for free when they purchase any of the JIDE products. So it is not a common layer just for JIDE products but also for our customers. By open sourcing this layer, we hope it will because a de-facto standard building block for any Java Swing applications.

JIDE Common Layer has around 100K lines of code as it is right now. It has over 40 components and utilities which greatly enhances the component set already provided by Swing. Since it is the foundation of all other JIDE products, we will keep enhancing this common layer including adding new components, adding new features to existing components and fixing bugs. We of course welcome other open source developers to contribute to this project and make it thrive.

JIDE promotes component reuse either in open source format or as commercial license. All existing JIDE products will remain as commercial licensed for companies who want a complete and high quality component solution. For the open sourced JIDE Common Layer, we will also provide a maintenance contract for those who will need a high quality technical support which you can’t find in most open source projects.

Well, this is the idea. We will find out soon how this works out. So stay tune for this great news!

Here is the news on Ben Galbraith’s Blog.