Java Posse Roundup

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

I've spending the week in beautiful Crested Butte, Colorado at the Java Posse Roundup. It's the fourth year in a row, with record attendance. And as always, it's been fantastic. It's hard to explain an Open Space conference - it doesn't sound like it would work, and I was personally surprised to see how well it worked when I attended the first time. Now I simply expect it, and it always delivers. One key reason why this open space conference works so well compared to say "unconference" events attached to major face-forward conferences is that you need to be away from everything and really immerse yourself - and here up in the Rockies we certainly are isolated!

The day before the conference started we had a "Languages Dojo" day where people pick different languages they're interested and go off building something. We had planned in advance to build a JavaFX version of the "Ohm Writer", a Zen-like text editor that is full screen, has nice relaxing background music, background sounds and typing sounds. We had a great time, and made a lot of progress. Unfortunately, we spent a lot of the day fighting with git (the version control system). I'm a very happy Mercurial user, but I've had a little bit of git-envy since I know it can combine local changesets into a single changeset to be pushed to the repository. I could see myself using that a lot. And setting things up on github for collaboration was very easy. But that's where the fun ended - nothing worked, simple merges aborted, error messages were completely unhelpful, and in general we repeatedly ended up checking out new clean workspaces and hand applying changes. I liked Mercurial before but now I appreciate it even more. (I hear the guys who were doing functional programming also were ripping their hair out with git. P.S. Joel Spolsky just posted a Mercurial tutorial).

The app is functional, and more importantly we made the editor start up immediately, load images and audio in the background and gradually fade in the image as soon as it's available. We also had difficulty playing the keyboard "click" sound until we realized you don't want to just repeatedly call play() on a media player -- you have to reset it -- either setting mediaPlayer.currentTime = 0s or calling mediaPlayer.playFromStart().

We also ran into another bug -- and this is a gotcha I've seen before, so it seems useful to highlight it here: For JavaFX Strings, null and "" are the same! Therefore, you don't want to write code like this:

while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
// use line
}

because this will terminate the loop as soon as you reach an empty line!! Be very careful about checking for nulls explicitly when dealing with Strings.

We've also had Lightning Talks in the evenings. If you're not familiar with Lightning Talks, these are very quick presentations, one after the other, on any subject, but limited to 5 minutes. Yes, with a HARD 5 minute limit. The advantage of limiting the lightning talks to 5 minutes is that it forces the presenter to really focus on the interesting parts of the subject, and if it's really not interesting, at least you're only bored for a couple of minutes! The topics this year were really great though - there was even a fire-eating demonstration!
One way to keep track of the time is to use a countdown timer. We wrote one in JavaFX last year, which displays a classic countdown timer (imported Photoshop graphics) and a sound file playing as the timer is expiring. It's available as a webstart app if you want to run it for your own lightning talks, or you can study the code.

In addition to the morning open space conference sessions, the evening lightning talks, the progressive dinners, we've had some afternoon technical presentations and coding sessions -- check out our improvised projector screen in our living room: