Interview with the JFXtras team

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 5, 2012 | Interviews

JFXtras is a library project for JavaFX that provides a bunch of useful API – particularly new UI controls (which you can see by running the JFXtras Ensemble application). It was founded back in the early JavaFX 1.x days, but has recently begun rebooting itself for JavaFX 2.x. I’ve been working with the project to help it get kickstarted, and wanted to post the following interview to introduce you to a few of the original committers to the project. I should note that this interview was done in early March, but has been waiting for the release of JFXtras Labs 0.1 before publishing it. Now that this has happened, enjoy the interview 🙂

A (somewhat) close facsimile of the four interviewees: Tom, Dean, Steve, and, um, Gerrit

Welcome gentlemen, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. Could you please briefly introduce yourselves.
tbee: My name is Tom Eugelink, 41 years old, 2 kids, and I live in the Netherlands. I’ve been writing computer software since I was 14, which seems like a century ago. First just for fun; basic on the VC20, C64, Amiga, and then I decided to go serious and did a formal 4 year study in software engineering. Back then Pascal and C were the leading languages and Unix (SUN) the operating system we worked with. After that I started a job as a software engineer, where I was part time send out to clients and part time working in house. And basically is what I’m still doing now, almost 20 years later, only self employed.
In the company I worked for back then, I had risen to the mysterious level of senior software engineer, when Java first hit the spot lights. And I expected it to be a game changer, compared to the cumbersome languages we were using at that time. So I convinced the company to jump on the Java 1.1 band wagon, and luckily my hunch turned out to be correct. A funny fact is that the first project we did using Java, still is continuing today and I’m still on a regular basis developing on that code base, which now has migrated to Java 1.7.
steve: I will keep it short…  My name is Stephen Chin and I am a JavaFX hacker.  (with the long version here)
gerrit: My name is Gerrit Grunwald, 42 years old, 2 kids and i live in Germany. I started playing around with computers in 1984 on a Texas Instruments Ti-994A followed by a Sharp MZ 731, Sharp MZ 821, Amiga, PC and finally a Mac. I studied applied physics and started working as an so called Application Scientist doing installations and training of hard- and software. After three years traveling around the world i decided that it was time to spend more time on coding and moved to the Software Development department. I started coding Java around 2003 because i needed a platform that supports Mac and Windows.
dean: I’ll follow Steve’s lead.  My name is Dean Iverson, I’ve been a JavaFX fanboy and JFXtras contributor since before it was cool.

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