It’s been a busy few weeks for me with JavaOne Japan in early April, a heap of development work on JavaFX 2.2, and JavaOne India coming up next week. I’ve slightly dropped the ball on interviews during all of this, but here is another interview from a member of the JavaFX team at Oracle. Peter Zhelezniakov is an engineer in the WebView team, where he works on WebView-related JavaFX APIs all the way down to working with the Webkit code that WebView uses under the covers. Enjoy – and feel free to ask WebView related questions here – I’m sure Peter will be happy to help.

Hi Peter – thanks for offering to be interviewed. Could you please introduce yourself?
I came to the JavaFX team from Swing, where I was working mostly on Look-and-Feels, but also on Swing’s own HTML package.

So you work on the WebView feature of JavaFX. This is a major component of the new JavaFX 2 series of releases – could you please give an overview of what exactly WebView is?
WebView is a JavaFX node used to display Web pages, with the help of the underlying WebEngine object. It is basically a browser component with a richer programming interface: you can for example examine structure of a page, inject arbitrary scripts, or listen to HTML events. Internally it is a Java wrapper around the Webkit open browser engine used by many desktop and mobile browsers.

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Hi all. I’m currently sitting in a hotel room in Tokyo, but I’ve been waiting to publish this interview until Jim and Steve made their announcements this week. Now that the news of their employment at Oracle is out, here is the interview. Enjoy!

Hi Jim and Stephen, would you please introduce yourselves?
Jim: Hi Jonathan, I’m Jim Weaver, long-time application developer with a particular interest in rich-client Java/JavaFX development.
Steve: I am also a JavaFX client hacker and enjoy working on several different open-source projects related to this.

You’ve both been involved with JavaFX for a long time. What drew you into JavaFX in the first place, and what keeps you going with it?
Jim: Rich-client development should be simple and elegant, but the post-1994 trend has been to force-fit the browser into being an application execution environment.  Consequently, many rich-client applications are comprised of Rube Goldberg machine-esque combinations of HTML, JavaScript, XML and other technologies.  JavaFX is an elegant and powerful technology for creating rich-client applications that run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

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This interview is with a team mate of mine – David Grieve. As you’ll discover in this interview, he has been involved with JavaFX for a long time. I won’t spoil any more of the interview – so enjoy and feel free to leave comments in this blog related to JavaFX CSS support.

One small note: I will be away at JavaOne Japan for the next two weeks, so it is likely I won’t publish any more of the interviews I have until I get back. Now, on with the interview!

Hi David. Could you please introduce yourself to everyone?
I’m a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with a Bachelor degree in Computer Science. I got started in Java in 1997 when I helped develop a Java-based network-management tool. Since then, I’ve been programming almost exclusively in Java. On the personal side, I live in New Hampshire with my wife and our two children.

You’ve been in the JavaFX controls team longer than I have – how long have you been working on JavaFX?
I’ve been working on JavaFX since 2008 when I led the development of the Media Browser tutorial which was part of the 1.0 effort. I became part of the UI controls team around the start of the 1.2 development cycle. I took on the development of CSS at that time, which would have been March, 2009, if I recall correctly. It all seems so long ago.

As long as I’ve known you, you’ve always worked on CSS support in JavaFX. Firstly, I must thank you – CSS in JavaFX is wonderful.
Thanks! But a lot of the credit has to go to Richard and Jasper who set the direction. Concepts that really make JavaFX CSS powerful – such as color derivation, property lookup, and multiple background colors and borders – come from them. I just put the code together to make it all work.

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Today I have an interview with Jeff Hoffman, a member of the Java team at Oracle. Enjoy the interview!

Hi Jeff – could you please introduce yourself to the readers?
Jeff Hoffman, I’m the lead user experience developer for Java at Oracle.

You’re a member of the Java team at Oracle, but what is it that you actually do in general?
I work closely with the Java team members who are creating anything that will eventually be seen by an end user.  I cover the end-to-end deployment experience from the java.com website where most users get Java on their computer to the launch sequence for an applet or web start application. This is where I have the largest impact since install, update and application launch processes have a lot of end user visible components.  Much of my focus these days has been on the impact that our security measures have on application launch — specifically the dialogs we show when an application is requesting elevated permissions.

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It’s time for another interview, this time with Gerrit Grunwald, or hansolo_ as he is known on Twitter. Gerrit has been in my weekly desktop links posts dozens of times, each time relating to his work on his SteelSeries project, which is a collection of gauges and other UI components for Swing. Even better, he has started working on JavaFX versions of these controls, and this is why I am please to be interviewing him today.

Briefly, in other interview news, I’m lining up a number of other interesting people, both inside Oracle and from the community. I’ll put these interviews out over the next few months, at a rate of one or two a week I imagine.

Hi Gerrit – could you please introduce yourself to everyone?
I’m working as a software developer at Quintiq GmbH in Germany where I’m responsible for visualizations of all kinds. I’m really in love with Java Desktop and I’m addicted to custom controls of all kinds because it’s pure fun. I founded the Java User Group in Münster (Germany) where I’m living and my heart beats for the community.

You’re a relative newcomer to the JavaFX world, joining around the release of JavaFX 2.0. What drew you into JavaFX?
I tried JavaFX in the early days when it even was not JavaFX but F3 and liked the concepts but somehow JavaFX Script was not made for me which kept me away from using it. When Oracle announced JavaFX 2.0 and I saw the implementation in pure Java I started another try and got infected. Now after using JavaFX 2.x for some months I just can say…I LOVE IT.

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I’m slowly trying to get more interviews up on this site, as I think it is really informative to learn what your peers are doing and thinking about a platform. The following interview is with Carl Dea (whom I’ll let introduce himself in a few lines). I know Carl from JavaOne 2009 where we shared a hotel room for the week, as we had both won tickets to the conference (this was slightly before I joined Sun), and we spent the time going between the various Java desktop sessions and meeting people we’d only previously known online. It was an incredibly fun time!

Also, before I begin the interview, I also wanted to quickly wanted to note that Carl was also interviewed by Nicolas Lorain for the Oracle Author Podcast (Direct MP3 download). With that done, here is the interview. Enjoy!

Hey Carl, would you please introduce yourself?
I am the co-author of the book Java 7 Recipes, author of JavaFX 2.0 Introduction by Example, and the technical reviewer of the recently released Pro JavaFX 2 A Definitive Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology from Apress publishing. For my day job I am a Senior Software Engineer for BCT-LLC. By night I am a Java/JavaFX and Rich Client enthusiast who blogs at CarlFX.

You’ve been involved in the JavaFX world for a long time? What drew you into it?
I have been involved with JavaFX from the beginning when it was called F3 (Form Follows Function) created by Chris Oliver which eventually had been acquired by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle corp). What drew me into JavaFX was the fact that in the beginning JavaFX 1.x was a graphics language (DSL) capable of combining lower level graphics drawings, user interface controls, media, and animation capabilities with very little effort. At the time as a Java Swing developer I found that building a UI application was a pretty challenging task, so I resorted to using framework libraries to build well behaved UIs. To my surprise JavaFX 1.x seemed to be a natural step in moving Java on the desktop forward. So, I continued to boldly go where no Cobol developer has gone before.
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It was my pleasure to recently come across the GroovyFX project, which works to make building JavaFX 2.0 user interfaces easier and more powerful from the Groovy language. I decided to reach out to the two main developers to see if they would kindly answer some questions relating to this project. Fortunately they agreed, and so here today we have the first interview on FX Experience. Enjoy!

Please introduce yourselves
Jim Clarke: I have been working with JavaFX for several years and am co-author of JavaFX-Developing Rich Internet Applications.
Dean Iverson: I work at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute where I work with various rich client technologies.  I was an early adopter of JavaFX and a co-author of Pro JavaFX Platform.

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