Andres Almiray's Weblog

All things come to and eventually, and for Desktop Matters this is it. During dinner Eitan Suez presented JMatter which totally blew me away, it turns out JMatter is the framework (or at least the building blocks) I was waiting for when thinking in a Grails-like framework for Swing. Groovy support is on the roadmap, definitely worth to keep an eye on it.

The day ended with two non-java presentations, the first one was by Microsoft (Jaime) and its WMF format. Al thought I do not have used .Net in my whole life I respect what these guys are doing and they even have the same problems we as Java developers have, really.

The other presentation was about Adobe's Flex2 and Apollo, by Kevin, if you haven't heard it before, Apollo is Adobe's new product that will let you run flash (and flex enabled) applications on the desktop, very impressive.

Now a curious thing is that through out the whole show, Ben was busting Chet's chops by cutting jokes about the timing framework, totally hilarious, those two are excellent presenters (and hosts) and overall good guys.

As an added bonus I got one of Eitan's recently self-published books on JMatter and even have it signed by him, thanks Eitan, talk too you soon about Groovy support on JMatter.

In the end this event wouldn't be possible if it weren't by Jay's, Ben's and Dion's dedication to bringing together the community, thank you all!

desktopmatters jmatter swing

The second day of Desktop Matters continues, Ben already did a recap of what happened earlier today. After what Ben described we had Binding JSR from Hans and Scott which continued on Scott's previous announcement some weeks ago. James and Jesse showed how to setup a fairly complex application based on Glazed Lists, and using only one List model, impressive.

Then it was the turn for Wolf to show us the power for SwixML, for which I'm not still convinced, having worked in a previous project with a similar solution (jelly-swing) and that thing exploded right on my face later. Etienne (which did the canoo ULC presentation) also talked about IntelliJ Idea and its form designer back to back with Tim which did the same with NetBeans and Matisse. Then Ben thrumped both (in my opinion) with JFormDesigner, it runs in standalone mode and as a plugin for Idea and Eclipse.

After a quick break Chet took the stage and talked about the timing framework and filthy rich clients, swing effects for your app (because Romain couldn't make it).

Finally it was time for Alex&Yvonne to present TestNG-Abbot... the audience was speechless afterwards, you could see that even at its early stages, the project had piked their curiosity.

That's everything for now, dinner is coming.

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The first day of Desktop Matters has (almost ended, the party is going on) and its been a wonderful experience. Ben and Dion started the keynote by showing the similarities and differences between the AJAX world and the desktop world in the last couple of years, which in their opinion, the lines are getting blurry as the months pass by. They also presented a list of items that may give the desktop and edge over AJAX (for the time being) like speed, access to devices and local resources, security, time will tell how ajax catchs up.

Then it was the turn for Chet Haase and Hans Muller to talk about the current state of Swing and where it is going, like the Swing Application Framework, the TimingFramework, BeansBinding, cool stuff. After a little break, Richard Bair showed off SwingLabs and SwingX for which some new components have been reviewed and added, making it a great set of widgets. Richard gave special attention to the AsynchronousHttpRequest object and its children, which lets you talk to the server in a similar manner as XHR lets you on AJAX apps.

Then it was time for dinner and a panel from the Swing team. Lastly someone from the audience (didn't catch the name) presented a project that lets you mix sound to generate a 3D experience, the interface was a little old (it was done on 2003) but the functionality its amazing, you can generate a graph dragging points and/or using formulas and the sound will follow it and warp accordingly; he said he was preparing something big for this year's JavaOne.

Tomorrow the agenda includes interesting talks, can't wait to see what Kirill (Swing Effects), Eitan (JMatter) and Alex&Yvonne (TestNG-Abbot) present.

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I'm going to the DesktopMatters conference! The speaker lineup is amazing, this event looks very promising as you would expect of anything coming from Big Sky and Ben & company. I'll be very glad to meet people that also develop AJAX applications.

See you there!

desktopmatters swing