Interview with Daniel Zwolenski

by Jonathan Giles | Aug 12, 2012 | Interviews

Today I have an interview with Daniel Zwolenski, a developer who has been involved with JavaFX, both from a commercial point of view, and as part of the open source community. He is active in openjfx-dev mailing list discussions, as well as running a very popular blog on using JavaFX in enterprise environments. I first had the privilege to meet up with Daniel when I was living in Brisbane, Australia last year, and he continues to be a contributor to the future of OpenJFX discussions today. Without further ado, lets get go with the interview – please enjoy! 🙂

Hi Daniel – could you please introduce yourself to everyone?
For the last 14 years I have been working in the Java application space, designing and building Java applications of all shapes and sizes for many different clients and industries. I’m based in Australia, currently in Melbourne, but I have worked in the UK, Ireland and very briefly in France.

Among many other projects, I was the architect and led the development of Coinland (an online virtual world for kids sponsored by one of the major Australian banks), I’ve driven the re-development of SMART (the key reporting tool for the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy in the state of NSW), and I’ve been a core part of the team that developed the management system for Tourism Australia’s ATE (the largest tourism expo in the southern hemisphere).

I’ve deliberately stayed as an independent contractor, changing fields and companies in search of the most interesting and challenging work. I love the variety, and opportunity this provides to grow my skills and expand my experiences. I have managed teams of all shapes and sizes, worked in with large corporate teams, and at times, acted as a one-man development team.

I get a buzz from interacting with my users and user interface development has always been my preferred space. I cut my teeth on Microsoft’s Visual C++ and MFC platform, and then happily made the move to Java when Swing was released. I’ve worked in the web space, but always felt limited by what I could provide for my users, even when using technologies like GWT. I’ve also developed Android applications and been involved with some iPhone development.

JavaFX is a very natural fit for me, and a platform that I really want to see dominate mainstream application development. I want to be at the point where 9 out of 10 contracts on seek.com are looking for JavaFX developers, and when I walk in and pick up some legacy system, it’s a JavaFX application, not a webapp. In a perfect world I would never have to debug another cross-browser JavaScript problem, or worry about what will happen to my session scope if the user hits the back-button.

Although I love to code, I don’t use computers much outside of development. I spend a lot of my time working with non-profit organisations, especially environmental ones. Recently I have taken on a contract with Our Community, a group providing software and services to the non-profit sector. It’s an awesome place that is the perfect balance of commercial systems development, community awareness and social conscious. Unfortunately they are not yet using JavaFX, but I hope to have them converted before too long!

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Interview with Tom Schindl

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 13, 2012 | Interviews

This time around I have an interview with Tom Schindl, a developer who has been active on the openjfx-dev mailing list teaching the Oracle engineers a thing or two about OSGi, and how to play nice with it. We really value his feedback, and all other feedback we receive from members of the JavaFX community. Enjoy the interview, and if you have any feedback about what Tom is discussing, please feel free to leave comments on this post. I’ll make sure he keeps an eye out and answers any questions you may have :-).

Hi Tom – could you please introduce yourself to everyone?
In my daytime job I’m cofounder and CTO of a small software company named BestSolution.at located in western Austria where we develop solutions for and provide consulting to customers around the world.

We have put our focus in the last years on OSGi and Eclipse technologies and because of this engagement I’ve become a committer on various Eclipse projects including the next generation of the Eclipse Platform named e4 (the foundation of the Eclipse 4.2 SDK) for which I wrote the initial prototype together with an employee from IBM.

You’re a relative newcomer to the JavaFX world, joining around the release of JavaFX 2.0. What drew you into JavaFX?
At the time JavaFX 2.0 got released I was searching since some time already for an alternate UI technology. Because of Eclipse RCP we historically worked and still work in many project with SWT. Like any technology SWT has its advantages and disadvantages. One of major problems is and was that you can’t really style all properties of a control because the widget is not drawn by SWT but the native widgettoolkit and so I was searching for another UI technology which doesn’t have such a limitation.

So JavaFX 2.0 came just at the right time for me and I liked the design of the toolkit including its property and observables API (at Eclipse I’ve been involved in the eclipse databinding library so I know this problem domain a bit) and most importantly the useage of CSS to declaratively styling the UI, interesting enough is that once more at Eclipse we decided to use CSS as well to style the e4 platform.

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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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Interview with Peter Zhelezniakov

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 24, 2012 | Interviews

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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Interview with Jim Weaver and Stephen Chin

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 5, 2012 | Interviews

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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