One of the cool things about the JavaPolis conference, over and above the great technical content, is simply the Metropolis facility where the conference is held. Imagine a 24-screen megaplex movie theatre that houses Java geeks by day, and shows films like Chicken Little and King Kong at night, and you'll understand what I mean. When you're giving a presentation, you laptop is projected behind you onto the full movie theatre screen in a humongous size, so it's one of the few venues where no audience member complains that they cannot read your screen!
Anyway, I attended a 3-hour presentation on the first day by Romain Guy and Richard Bair about Swing development. They explained all about the Swing Labs projects and the increasing focus Sun is placing on making Swing development easier. The presentation theatre was packed ceiling to floor with developers interested in doing Swing development, and the various hands that went up in answer to the presenters questions made me think that most of the probably 400+ developers in the audience were actually active practioners of Swing development today. This was great to see because our back-of-the-envelope calculations are that about 40% of our (thousands!) of enterprise customers using JDeveloper and Oracle ADF are developing desktop clients with Swing. Some of these are doing both web and Swing development, others do only one or the other.
During the break, I chatted to Richard Bair about the SwingLabs DataBinding project that he introduced during the talk. The concepts there seem very similar to what we've had for a while in the Oracle ADF Model databinding layer and whose declarative binding metadata we're trying to standardize in JSR-227. He explained that currently the Java Studio Creator team implemented their own data binding solution, but that the will was there to converge in the future on a single declarative databinding solution between the NetBeans and Java Studio Creator teams at sun, so both JSF and Swing would use the same data binding. That is the situation we have in JDeveloper 10g Release 10.1.3, where both JSF and Swing (and JSP/Struts) leverage the same declarative databinding layer, against beans, EJB's, ADF Business Components, web services, XML or CSV data, etc. I hope in the context of the JSR-227 expert group we can find common ground so we don't end up with multiple declarative databinding solutions for Swing (and JSF!)
The December 2005 OTN Java Developer Newsletter highlights some of the cool features JDeveloper 10g release 3 offers for Swing development, too, with articles, screencasts, and case studies. Check it out here.
9:20:12 AM 
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