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Last December I did a presentation about JavaFX in Spanish for the Panama Java User’s Group (JUG). This event took place in the city of Chitre, and was a lot of fun to participate in, specially since it gave me a chance to visit my native country. The presentation aimed to serve as an introduction to JavaFX, providing an overview of the main features of the language. I showed some simple demos from Sun, and a few I created myself. At the end, we went over my JavaFX clock implementation and discussed a bit what place JFX occupies in the RIA technology space. The slides are featured at the top of this post, and are in Spanish of course. Thanks to Aristides Villareal, and the members of the Panama JUG for inviting me to this wonderful event! I was lucky enough to bring along one of my daughters, Sofia, and she enjoyed the trip very much.

I have to say, the most difficult part of preparing this presentation was trying to figure out the Spanish version of common programming words and concepts. Part of the problem is that when I was learning how to program in Panama (when I was around 10-12 years old) all of my resources; magazines, books, etc where all in English. So I never knew that array is “arreglo”, that a developer is called a “desarrollador”, or what the corresponding word for loop is. It would be really nice if there was some type of resource out there with a table with all these terms, and maybe other languages. One challenge is that it seems not all of these words are “settled”. I noticed some people were still pretty comfortable with the English versions, while others used the Spanish ones exclusively. Also, there are a lot of emerging technologies and concepts in Computer Science which I think still don’t have Spanish translations. Pretty much a more difficult challenge than I expected.

One more thing, JavaFX has changed a lot in the last year. When I did this presentation, I didn’t cover how much effort has gone into optimizing this technology or the new changes to the animation API (like the deprecated dur keyword). There is a preview JFX SDK coming out next month, and you can sign up for it at javafx.com. I didn’t attend JavaOne this year, so I don’t know all the details, but I’m hoping the SDK comes with some of the tooling that Sun has promised. Designer level tools are key to this technology’s success. I hope to make a blog post with a quick review of the SDK once it comes out.

Filed under: Java, Software Development, Technology, Travel, User Interface on May 18th, 2008