Desktop Apps made easier, JavaFX and that ESB thing…

Isn’t it always the way, when you want to blog other stuff comes up? I had intended to write up a final post about the last day of Tech Days, but the weather has been great to get the kite out and the holiday is winding down so…

Day 3 was pretty cool, as I went to a few tech sessions related to stuff that I don’t normally work with, as I do web apps most of the time. The Netbeans sessions were pretty good, with a great demo of the Matisse GUI Builder. I think that with Netbeans 6, Java has finally got it’s answer to the VB/Delphi mode of development. The introduction of the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) and Beans Binding (JSR 295), really takes away a lot of the grunt work in building small to mid sized desktop apps, and Netbeans does a great job in hiding a lot of the initial application setup code. It’s really nice stuff, and to be honest it really drops the barrier to entry. At some stage you will inevitably need to get into the bowels of Swing, but Matisse gives you a great leg up and means that the learning curve can be that little bit easier. The fact that basic CRUD type applications are pretty well automatically generated is a huge help and lets you get down to doing the interesting bits.

I had the pleasure afterwards to turn up to Jim Weaver’s presentation on Java FX that give a great overview of how the technology worked from an architectural perspective. The user interface is defined using FX Script, which has a weird nested CSS-ish feel to it and is used to define your interface, event handlers and UI transitions. This is then compiled down to a Java app. The apps themselves are distrubuted either as applets (remember those?) or via Webstar/JNLP and talk to the home server via JSON invocations, which means that anything can support the interface on the server side. It would be cool to have a play with sticking a Grails app on the back. Nifty stuff.

The last session was no less interesting, as I am finally getting my head around this ESB stuff! I’ve always found the concept a bit esoteric, not having worked in an environment that uses a bus and it’s not something that lends itself easily to kicking the tires. SOA initiatives that I have worked on in the past involved point to point hooks, but I can really see why the ESB concept might come in handy. It’s very easy to get bamboozled by talk of federation, mediation and orchestration. Essentially the idea is pretty simple – hook up everything to a massive pipe, define standard messages and worry only about communication with the pipe itself. The devil, as in any such thing, is in the details – but essentially the pipe handles things like transactionality, message delivery, data transformation, enrichment, routing and the like through underlying mechanisms. You need to understand how to use the specific pipe in question, as with any such piece of infrastructure, but the payoff looks really good. I have not yet come across a decent guide in layman’s english (not a marketecture white paper) as to how to get everything humming, but I feel like the pieces are falling into place.

Winding down the Australia trip this week for my migration to London. Back to reality – CVs, agents, company setups, finding apartments and poms 😉 All I have to deal with is a flood of contractors on the market because of the sub-prime debacle (wasn’t Basel2 supposed to make sure this nonsense wouldn’t happen?) and the April budget rounds. Bring it on!


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