Java One 2009 – Day 4
Posted on 07. Jun, 2009 by todd in Java
Friday Keynote – The "Toy Show"
In what has become an anual tradition, James Gosling hosted a two hour session in which he highlights some of his favorite things by the Java community. It’s a good show and well worth a watch. I was pretty happy to see Brendan Humpries of Atlassian get a Dukie award from James for his fine Clover product. Well deserved indeed. Other highlights for me included seeing a sneak preview of the Java/FX designer tool that Tor (and no doubt a cast of tens) have been working on for a while. The FIRST robotic competition was also very interesting as well. Nice to see an organization working to give kids access to building cool things and learning about engineering and programming disciplines in a fun environment. As well the work being done by Mifos in the realm of Micro Financing (like kiva.org) is very inspiring.
Getting Started with WidgetFX: Open-Source Widget Desktop Platform
WidgetFX is the widget desktop platform developed by Stephen Chin. I’m not 100 percent sure but I think Joshua Marinacci is involved with the project a bit. This widget platform was at least inspired from Josh’s AB5K/Glassitope swing based widget framework. It sounds like the Java/FX implementation makes this sort of thing easier to do than the Swing equivilant. Looks like an interesting project but to be honest I’m not a big user of Google gadgets/Apple’s Dashboard etc. I suppose if there was a bunch of cool widgets that would make my life easier then maybe I would be a bigger fan but it’s not one of those things that I’m that interested in. I do need to have a closer look at the Nabaztag rabbit he had wired up to a widget. Would make a great build monitor.
Defective Java Code: Mistakes That Matter
Bill Pugh, the creator of the findbugs project has presented at a number of Java Ones in previous years. He’s always entertaining and has a ton of great content. He’s currently on sabatical at Google and had a few observations about some patterns that he found. Find Bugs is one of those tools that I’ve looked at a few times but haven’t really done much with. It’s something I want to integrate into our incremental build process but there is the potential of sending the team off into bug fixing mode without any direction.
Bill had some good advice that would make this process easier I think.
- Start with new code. Changes will be fresh in the developers mind and the chance of introducing a side effect into working code is zero.
- As a team, identify the types of bugs you want to concentrate on. We wouldn’t be worried about SQL injection bugs for example but might be very interested in threading issues.
- One approach that worked at Google was after identifying the bugs you want to concentrate on, have a bug fixing day or two or three. Make it a fun experiment with the goal of keeping unit tests running and squishing as many bugs as the team can in a short period of time.