techno.blog("Dion")

JNI is often scoffed at for being insanely difficult.

JNA aims to make it easier for you to access native code, and I heard about it from Romain (they used it in their Swing makeover talk to do cool windows).

I have heard of a mythical group at Sun who created a simple way to load a DLL/SO and allow you to go right after it. Some at Sun didn’t like the idea as it would be so easy, that some users may go native too often.

I need to look closer at it, but in theory it looks really good.

Ben has released his Clarity framework to open source.

The framework is built from the pain that Ben has felt working in Swing all of these years ;)

If you keep mucking up threading, don’t feel productive, or wish that you could style your Swing apps with CSS…. give it a peak.

With the Rails buzz humming along, many want a piece. One subtle way is to come up with an Active* project.

After looking at the WS-* “map”, I wonder how the Active* compares. It is also funny that Active is close to meaningless.

Anyway, I am off to create ActiveGuitarHero.

We invited Aza Raskin to talk on the death of the desktop at The Ajax Experience, and it went down very well.

Google brought him in last week to discuss this topic more, and has posted the talk (inline below).

These are fun topics to think about… not only how to make your work usable today, but how to think about the future.

When I think about the zoom metaphor, and how we need to do a better job with space so our users can easily take search and navigation to make the optimal experience, I think about how sites such as iGoogle could be poised to be there.

Aza shows a demo of his Zoom work where you can obviously zoom in and out to find your data. The objects are real. You see a hyperlink and you can zoom in to see the page itself. You don’t need to go somewhere else.

iGoogle can be the jumping off point. Already I have portlets that surface high level content such as feeds with the Google Reader gadget, maps, Gmail, etc. These are the high level view, and I can click through to zoom in.

Right now this is a primitive process, but you could see how it could be expanded to be more of Aza’s vision.

The big news from the keynote was JavaFX.

As WPF/E is to Silverlight, F3 is to JavaFX Script. I wonder if the press will go nuts for this, seeing as though we have known about all of this tech for awhile.

F3 is interesting, but really, another scripting language? Another new thing to learn?

Once again Sun goes for its own thing, and Microsoft has allowed you to write in anything (well, not quite), and Adobe gives you JavaScript which everyone knows.

What is in common between JavaFX Script, Silverlight, Apollo? It is all alpha! :)

Watching the keynote was a little painful too. Between the “this is about humanity” crud, and the broken demos, and the hilarious “who would want this phone!” [one person whistles]. Yowser. Steve Jobs must be having a bit of a laugh.

Hani, were you paid off to write this?. Having someone get up on stage and talk about how “Java is humanity” is touching? It was corny as all hell.

I had the pleasure of joining the Java Posse last week to record an episode on the new exciting world of RIA, which was good timing considering the big recent news from Adobe and Microsoft.

A bunch of the Java Swing team were there, and I had the feeling that the wish the round table could have happened this week, after a few announcements at JavaOne.

It is kinda funny that a lot of the things we are looking at doing, have been available via Applets for years, but Sun managed to mess up the execution.

Romain Guy somehow thought it important to get pictures of our ugly mugs. I know that I have got the face for radio, so I was hoping to hide behind the voice.

Thanks again to the posse. I had a really enjoyable time.

Sam Ruby has kindly started to play with getting SVG support in IE 7 via the Silverlight runtime.

I am hopeful that we can do some other fixits, such as implementing Canvas on top of Silverlight (instead of explorercanvas which uses VML).

Can we fix CSS? :/

A nice analyst friend pinged me about the NYTimes site and how if you double click on *any* word on the page a popup (not an inline div) comes along querying for that word.

That seems a little bizarre. It appears to be happening in the code for searching on an alt click. I wonder if they really wanted this feature? ;)

One of the great parts of working at Google is that every day there are tech talks that I really want to listen too. More than I can spend the time to actually see.

Last week I talked about Philip Wadler of Monad / Generics / general functional fame. Yesterday, Linus showed us his strong opinions. Next week, G. LaForge is in to chat about Groovy. This is a strong subset of the great talks.

We record these talks, and place them on Google Video for anyone to see. This is great content, and most don’t know it exists.

I wanted to build a nicer landing page for the tech talks, and built it entirely with the AJAX Search API.

The following is a mockup of what this can look like. If we launch it on Google Code it will have to be white, but I was having a black day:

If you view-source you will see how it is powered by GvideoSearch, a nice low level JavaScript object that lets you programatically search our video content.

showcase.js has the JavaScript meat, and you will see that there isn’t much too it. In fact, the majority of the code is for setting up a lightbox overlay for when you play the inline videos, and other ugly DOM things.

There is a common misconception that the AJAX Search APIs are these widgets that you put on a page. In fact, the APIs give a full set of building blocks from the low level searchers such as GvideoSearch, to controls that wrap the searchers such as GSvideoSearchControl, and finally to wizards that will generate widgets for you.

Until I dove deep into the APIs I had no idea how much you could do, and it is fun to come up with use cases that allow me to build on top of them. You will see in this example that I have full control on the layout itself, and you do too.

Mark Pilgrim is sitting back watching the buzz on Apollo and Silverlight and thinks that it is silly season.

It is as though he has seen a time where the web was a little broken, and ActiveX controls were all over. We take it for granted that, with all of the pecky browser quirks, I can fire up Safari and Firefox on my Mac, and I don’t remember the last site that didn’t render well enough for me to use it. “Works best on IE” doesn’t really mean anything these days (apart from on some intranet environments).

Silverlight and Apollo are both great technical innovations, but I wouldn’t bet against the Open Web. I would love to see one or both of these companies truly opening their stack.