Well, it looks like Swing continues to be a technology that has matured enough to be left out to pasture. In addition to the Swing team departures at Sun, the most recent related event is that SwingX, one of my favorite libraries, has stopped being funded. I don’t see this as a huge problem, as most applications are heading to the web nowadays unless they have a hugely compelling reason to be on the desktop (Development IDEs, CAD, Drawing, Graphics apps). JavaFX continues to be the also-ran in the RIA lineup against Flex (forefront) and Silverlight (2nd place).
Archive for October, 2008
SwingX No Longer Funded
Friday, October 31st, 2008Open Source Survey Results
Friday, October 17th, 2008A recent survey reveals the top Open Source packages of 2008. I find it not at all surprising that Firefox tops the list and very interesting that Xerces cracks the top 3.
Ambient Ideas on the iPhone
Friday, October 17th, 2008Ambient Ideas has officially been accepted into the iPhone Developer Program, meaning we can finally deploy beta software to actual handsets and completed products to the iTunes / iPhone Application Store. Keep an eye out for our upcoming presentations at DJUG on iPhone + Java Web Services integration.
Appcelerator at DOSUG
Friday, October 17th, 2008Matt Quinlan of Appcelerator visited the Denver Open Source Users Group for our October meeting and gave a great presentation on how Appcelerator is an abstraction layer from your choice of backend web service provider (Java, PHP, ruby, .Net) and also provides a tag library that gives you access to the best of Prototype, JQuery (coming soon), YUI, Scriptaculous, and more.
The best part is how easy it is to try out Appcelerator. Just load up this page and start playing. You’ll be hooked in no time and ready to download the SDK installer for your platform of choice.
DJUG October – Ken Sipe on JMX, Spring, MBeans
Friday, October 17th, 2008Attended DJUG’s October meeting, which was sponsored by NFJS and had Ken Sipe as presenter. He gave two presentations, the first on Spring and JMX, the second on 7 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. The room was packed. It was standing room only.
JMX Presentation Takeaways:
- You need to use JMX.
- Would you fly a plane without instruments?
- Then why fly software without JMX data on its in-flight status?
- Java 5 and above has MBean server.
- JSR 3 (literally, the 3rd JSR ever) = JMX
- JDK 6 -> Even Simpler -> GetPlatformMBeanServer()
Verizon Pantech UM175 Mobile Wireless Card on Mac OS 10.5 with Native Drivers
Friday, October 17th, 2008Apple has a discussion forum going on this very card, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of which was actually the right solution. So, I present to you here, screenshots and a walkthrough of the setup.
1) Purchase a Verizon Pantech UM175, one of the latest USB wireless cards from Verizon. Should be able to get it for $0 with a 2 year contract.
2) Plug it in. Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard will detect it as a modem
3) Change the settings per the screenshots below
3.a) Vendor: Sierra, Model: CDMA, Dial Mode: Ignore dial tone when dialing
3.b) Telephone Number: #777, Account Name: YOURNUMBER@vzw3g.com, Password: VZW
