The people of TSSJS used a device from OptionFinder to allow people to give real-time answers for different questions presented during the keynote sessions. This did give some nice insights on what people use to develop J2EE, what they do or don't like etc. Talking about this with Floyd, it struck me that in Europe we could easily do the same using SMS! Everybody has a phone and knows how to send an SMS (if you don't ask your children or any teenager out there).

We could have a keynote talk just to do the polls and find out in more detail what the JavaPolians do or don't, prefer etc.

From a technical point of view we just need to setup an SMS-server that can handle the messages, process it and give the results in real-time.
Setting this up could be a nice additional stress factor to introduce

Is there anybody out there who would be interested in helping us setting this up ?
Experience you (or your company) wants to share to set this up ?
Any company out there interested to drive this ?
If so, just post a comment or mail me...

Cheers,
Stephan

Day two of TSSJS was for me mainly a Spring and Oracle experience.

Floyd started the day by mentioning that the approach of inviting the same speakers who contribute to J2EE is "by Design". After a few more polls: 65% is not using or plan to use AOP, only 20% can introduce freely open-source API's, other have a committee to review this, it was time to Spring. (al wie da nie springt, al wie da nie springt, is ...) Rod Johnson dominates the symposium with 4 sessions!!

During lunch Ted Farrell from Oracle gave a fun keynote on "Does J2EE matter ?" with some nice demo's of EJB3 (an early draft implementation can already be downloaded from Oracle) and JSF. I wonder when Oracle will also make the switch to Eclipse ?

When JavaPolis 2005 takes place (by the way that's December 12th till 16th) migrating to EJB3 will be The Hot Topic! Hopefully by then every application server will support it... This is why I attended Mike's Keith talk to see if he could do a similar talk "How to migrate to EJB3" at JavaPolis, which he will Maybe we should again invite Gavin King for a talk on "Migrating Hibernate3 to EJB3", I'll check out his talk today and ask him if it makes sense and if he's interested.

Frank Cohen was sitting next to me during lunch, I knew him of the BEA Technical Director emails and told me he spends a lot of time with Java Communities around the Bay area. We exchanged cards so we could keep in touch on speakers, topics and other related Java stuff that might be of interested for both SIGs.

During that keynote, Floyd pointed out to me that they're using a "monitor" to count the number of minutes the speaker still has available. The application starts blinking when the time is over and I was just waiting to see if it would explode if the speaker exceeds his limit Great idea for JavaPolis. Floyd told me that during next years Symposium, he'll release a DVD of all the talks on it. This is great, the inspiration works both ways, now he stills needs to reduce his entry fee to 300 dollars

Peter Zadrozny said hello while I was in the process of gluing MyFaces with Spring, he confirmed that Oracle Corp. will again support our conference initiative, Great !! That reminds me, I need to get hold of the MacroMedia guys here in the US...

The last session I followed was a BOF from John Rizzo on JavaBlackBelt. I really like the initiative and idea but I was a bit disappointed that during the presentation Null Pointer Exceptions were still thrown Murphy was definitely present because he also turned of the lights for a few seconds.

So today I want to see Dain Sundstrom from Geronimo, Cameron Purdy, Gavin King and Jason Hunter in action and then it's back to Belgium...

• Date: March 22nd 2005
• Location: Atrium Seminars, Hof ter Vleestdreef, 1070 Brussel
• Price: Free for BeJUG members and JavaPolis attendees, 200 Euro for non-members.
• Registration: Send email to events@bejug.org?subject=Rich User Interface Seminar 2005

Most of us are used to work with Java on the server side and ignored or neglected Java at the client side. A lot happened in the last few years to make development for the client side in Java more appealing and to make the user interfaces more attractive.

The XUL frameworks play an important role to make the developer's and graphical designer's life a lot easier. XUL, which stands for XML User interface Language, was brought to everybody's attention in the late nineties when it was introduced with the Mozilla browser. Since then a lot of Java implementations of XML-based User interface Languages appeared, of which JellySwing, Thinlet, XUI and SwingML are the best known. To make life even easiers, some of the above frameworks even allow you to define the style in a seperate file, just as CSS does for HTML. There is only one bad thing about these frameworks, they are not interoperable, there is no universal accepted standard for XUL as there is for HTML or XHTML for example. You can not reuse the XML you wrote for one of the frameworks with another framework, they all define their own XML User interface Language.

The most heard complaint about client side applications in Java is that they are so ugly. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about Swing! The only problem is that it takes a lot of effort to make a good look and feel for Java applications. To make life easier, on javatoo.com you can find look and feels that you can easily incorporate in your own applications. Applications build with the look and feel of JGoodies or Skin Look And Feel look a lot better than when you use the standard look and feel!

Another approach is to build rich internet applications by taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people have the Flash plugin installed in their browser and that SWF can be dynamically generated on the server side by tools like OpenLaszlo or by using Flex. Both make use of XML based User interface Language, but here the XML is generated or written on the server side and compiled and send to the client to be executed by the Flash plugin in the browser.

Last but not least, there are new efforts like JDIC, which can be used to access native compontents (access to the browser, the tray, etc...) from within Java applications, and JDNC, which provides richer components, a higher level API and a XML User interface Language. These can greatly simplify development of Java desktop clients.

In this workshop, we will try to show the latest innovations in the above areas.

Hi,

We're finalizing (thanks to Bart Strubbe) the DVD registration process, which will be active (after some testing) around next week.

The actual DVDs will be ready for shipment beginning of April (another 2 weeks). The JavaPolis DVD dual-box will be yours for 29 Euro (+ VAT), non-European countries will pay an additional 10 Euro for shipment. The registration wizard will ONLY accept credit card purchases, a PDF invoice will be sent to you automatically through email!

Before we bring the DVD registration online, we'll migrate confluence from Tomcat to Resin (which will give us a better performance and disolve the client disconnection exceptions ). Next month we'll then upgrade to Confluence version 1.4 which elimates the right wiki column, giving us more room to place content.

Cheers,
Stephan