ACM Award

Hi all,

Many of you have heard that I am winning an ACM award this year for my work on Eclipse.  I'd like everyone to know that I am under no illusions about how much others have helped me to achieve this honour.  Obviously, the SWT committers, past and present come to mind but the community, the PMC and many others from IBM and the old OTI organization showed me the way.  Thanks everyone.

From now on, I'd like to be referred to as "Doctor, Sir Herr count von Northover, Esquire the 3rd",

Steve

Flogging my FrankenMac

I'm running a FrankenMac. It's a MacBook Pro with Windows 7 and Linux as guest operating systems.

For my talk yesterday, I was showing Fx running as an Eclipse plugin on Windows and Mac. I grabbed a few standard Fx examples, modified them slightly and dropped them in. Here is the ColorfulCircle example running in Eclipse:



For the demo, I had a total 4 Eclipses (two Windows, two Mac) and 6 Fx embeddings, each doing some sort of animation on my machine. The source Eclipses were full development environments with the source of Fx loaded into them. For extra fear, the Mac Eclipses were running JDK7. There were a few browsers running too on both operating systems and the slide software.

You might think that it would lurch, but it didn't. Incredible.

Steve

JavaOne

I'm speaking at JavaOne this year with Artem Ananiev. The title of the talk is "Using JavaFX 2.0 UIs with Swing and SWT". I've worked with Artem in the past but never actually met him. That's always cool.

Most of the hassles around interop with Swing and SWT were around threading. It was possible to embed one toolkit in the other, but programmers needed to be very careful to avoid deadlock. The rule of thumb was, "never wait" and use asyncExec() and invokeLater() to communicate between the two.

I'm happy to say that FX and SWT have no such hassles. Both are apartment threaded and share the same apartment.

Steve

Joining Oracle

I guess I've always been a UI guy and my attempts to deny it have failed! Don't get me wrong, I've been doing UI for the past couple of years but it's been on the application side. That was a great experience but it was time for a change.

Why join Oracle? Oracle isn't kidding. They are taking Java forward, removing roadblocks and doing whatever it takes. We've seen a few examples of this already. Oracle and IBM are working together. Oracle and Apple are working together and the Mac JVM is going to be better than ever. The old suspicions are gone and everyone is open for business.

At this point it's not quite clear exactly where I fit in but I'm an Eclipse fan and Oracle is an Eclipse supporter, so it makes sense to post here.

Now I'm off to fix some Swing bugs ...

Steve

After the break up ...

"A lot of people knew I left. I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." John Lennon (1970)

Steve

More from the archives

Good lord, my office was full of shit.

Thanks to Jim des Rivieres for pulling out his camera and documenting some of the artifacts that we found there. There's a lot of OTI and IBM history amongst the rubble as well as a few things I thought were funny over the years. I could explain it all but that would detract from the fun.

Steve

Artifacts from Steve's Office

Can you believe that someone thought this was a good idea?

Steve

Message from your Emperor - PLEASE READ - ACTION REQUIRED

Well guys, it's been a long fun strange trip. I've had a great time over the years with SWT and Eclipse, but it's time for this Sith Lord to be invading new galaxies.



Over the years working on Eclipse, there have been many high points and a few low ones. Making everyone laugh at JavaOne during the height of the "Swing vs SWT wars" was really fun and helped ease the tension. Around that time, there was a full time blogger or two, FUD'ing and crapping on the toolkit and me personally (it seemed) for daring to make a few operating system calls. Who would have believed that?

The best part of the job was working with everyone at OTI and IBM and meeting all sorts of different people from all over, either in person or through the bug system. Eclipse is a place where (almost) everybody plays and thanks to the Foundation and others in the community, this creates a lot of opportunity. Great work guys!

It's never a good time to leave, but right now is a clean point. We are about to ship Eclipse 3.5 and this is the best time for me to untangle myself from my commitments. Silenio Quarti will be taking over as SWT team lead at IBM and he is one of the greatest engineers I know.

June 12th will be my last day with IBM. I've accepted a position at Bedarra Research Labs. The exact details have yet to be nailed down, but after a short break, I'm looking forward to new engineering challenges.

Best wishes to everyone and thanks,

Steve

P.S. I can be reached as steve_northover confuse a spam bot somewhere near "mail that is hot" should there be an attack on the death star from the rebel base.