So yesterday at CommunityOne there were some hints about some developments on the Java client side. I guess it’s obvious to guess at this point, minutes before today’s JavaOne keynote that it’s going to be about JavaFX. This technology seems like a direct competitor with Adobe’s Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight, and may leverage existing installations [...]

I noticed I was sitting next to Josh Marinacci at the Java Posse podcast during NetbeansDay. I asked him about the demo and he said they’re not doing the AB5K desklet demo anymore. Sad to hear, I was hoping they would showcase it during one of the general sessions, specially when James Gosling was [...]

Well, technically today is “CommunityOne“. Got here late last night, and the conference started today at 10:00am. The first general session is discussion between Tim O’Reilly, Rich Green, Ian Murdock and Tim Bray. I got a bit late, but it’s a general discussion with some questions posted via email … nothing very technical at all. [...]

 
When I launch Netbeans 5.5, it seems I’ve installed some version control module that produces these two dialogs whenever I start the IDE. I still can’t figure out what the program wants me to do here. First of all, it has to be a bug and not a feature that it’s popping up 2 modal [...]

 
I uploaded the first version of the “magnetic desklet”. If you have AB5K installed, it should install and start by clicking/downloading this:
http://sellmic.com/download/MagneticDesklet.desklet.
I have a blog entry that describes the concept of what this is trying to do (not everything is implemented), and another post on the desklet dev list with more details. The short description [...]

Recently Joshua Marinacci and Robert Cooper announced their new AB5k project, a cross platform Java based widget system.
I’ve been pretty interested in the project and was wondering what desklet to develop. I’ve always been interested in window management issues, and in the AB5k forum there was a discussion about using the “magnet” name. That gave [...]

So this year I decided to give the Java 4K programming contest a try. I’ve been learning some Flash game programming techniques lately, but decided it be fun to try to create a little retro game with the same code size as some of the old classics (Space Invaders, Asteroids).
So far, it looks like [...]

Elliotte writes that Java doesn’t need properties. I sort of agree, there’s nothing inherently wrong with get/set methods, specially if you have a good IDE to automate that task for you. On the other hand, I don’t see how adding support for this feature, probably inspired as a reaction to C#, really hurts the language.
Nobody [...]

 
This is the first entry on a category I’d like to name “Code bloopers”. I recently got a message about a piece of code that was throwing a null pointer, it was basically of this form:
synchronized(this.foobar)
This is an easy one. If you think it’s because “this” is null, you have to go back to [...]