Twin Cities Java users group - Presentation on Jawin, a way to access Win32 Com objects through Java.
Too many software presentations make everything seem so easy. The presenter flys effortlessly through the examples, making flawless coding and configuration changes and never gets a compile error.. The audience walks away with the feeling that they can go home and do the same thing themselves in no time.
Well, this wasn't one of those presentations....
I appreciated this presentation because it gave a good indication of how much trouble an average person like me would have working with Jawin. The presenter was getting lots of error messages in front of a room full of Java programmers and couldn't complete his example successfully. This was actually more informative than a really slick presentation. We got to see what kind of stuff goes wrong. To his credit, the presenter tried a few things "without a safety net" He actually got curious about how a Powerpoint Macro would convert into Java and went ahead and tried it. 15 minutes later he was still getting debugging hints from the audience and pecking around looking for the = key. He was obviously a very skilled programmer and to see him having such trouble effectively warned me away. He prefaced the second part of his presentation by saying, "getting this next stuff to work is really complex and challenging". That really put me away. It was like watching a magician accidently burn his eyebrows off and then announce that he was going to try something really dangerous. To use JUnit with Jawin, you need to install Microsoft Visual C++ on top of everything else.
I am really glad he came out, but the presenter should have prepared more, he should have been on time, and he should have dressed better. He sat at his computer and read the headlines of his slides. At one point a huge black box with appeared on the overhead screen and we sat there in silence as chuckled about the Austin Powers clip he was watching on his laptop. I have seen too many ppt presentations go awry to not test the equipment before trying something like that.
I noticed with interest that after he ran ant on his project, he had to move the resulting jar file by hand to another directory. Rehan has been looking for a way to get ant to move the jar file(s) it builds to the directory of choice. Any Ideas????
12:07:40 AM 
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