Happy New Year everybody and may this be a healthy and great Java year !!

I've already received different mails from JavaPolians asking when the streams will be available, so here's an update.

The encoding of the presentations is going full-force ahead and hopefully we'll be able to make them all available around end of January.

The JavaPolis streams will be hosted by JavaLobby where a special dedicated JavaPolis-JavaLobby presentation page is being developed by Matt Schmidt. The setup will be as follows, JavaPolians who are already logged in on the JavaPolis wiki can access these JP presentation directly from our wiki without re-authenticating. New visitors can either signup on the JP wiki or go directly to the JavaLobby site where you can signup. Visitors surfing directly to the JavaLobby site will see a JavaPolis opt-out checkbox, this will (when checked) automatically create a JavaPolis confluence user so they also become a JavaPolis citizen

Each JavaPolis presentation page will have a hyper-link to the spreakers bio, abstract and related pictures. Visitors will also be able to discuss the talk, ask questions or leave comments. A download link to the slides will of course also be available.

Let me know if you've any additional suggestions or ideas...

Happy New Year !!!

Stephan
PS: If you can't wait, check out our test JavaPolis flash player [here].

I just finished the publishing of the JavaPolis Picture Album taken by our photographer, An Nelissen . I selected about 200 pictures of the 1000+ pictures taken during the event.

The album gives a chronological impression of the event, the speakers, and to some extend the atmosphere.
Please enjoy, and blog your feedback.

In case you have taken pictures yourselve during the event, we would be happy if you can share them.
So upload them to the official visitors' picture collection .

have jfun,
Jo

It's my turn to give you an update on the Javapolis media.
Stephan and me have quite finished the encoding of the video files (status [here]). It was a huge work. I think some of the university tracks may need to be splitted into smaller parts for a better user experience, so it is not completely finished but we can see the end.

So we are now finalizing the navigation (the cue points in the stream) and are working with Matt to put this on-line for free in the Javalobby.org infrastructure. If you wonder where is the video content right now, I can tell you it is flying on DVDs between Europe and the states.

Why a Flash player?

We have used Macromedia Flash technology to build our [Javapolis Media Player] and I must recognize that Flash technology do work perfectly for this kind of client-side flashy animations. Some of you have asked me why we use Flash technology and not Java technology to display these streams. Well, this is a choice we have made in May 2004. At that time, the few Java multimedia applet players were in early beta stages. I must admit that the situation is evolving fast in this area and that both commercial and open-source Java players are starting to be present on web pages. So I will definitely consider to use a Java applet for the streams of Javapolis 2005.

But I am a Java developer and I wanted to share with you my experience of Flash and how it is different than Java. I started to use Flash MX 2004 6 months ago, no previous experience with it and it was painful at the beginning.
Flash MX is the Flash development environment. It is a mix of a graphical wysiwyg editor with layers, a timeline for animations and an action script development environment. ActionScript is the language used to develop in Flash, it looks like Javascript to me. Unlike Java, action script is not strongly typed and that is not bad, very flexible and robust.
The Flash development environment is really lacking some important features, no check as you type, no auto complete, not possible to put breakpoints in classes,... such features Java developers are used to.

The biggest problem I had in using Flash, as Java developer, was to find the right balance in separating the view from the model. Flash does not really encourage you to separate view and model. There are here sometimes more drawbacks in separating view and model than advantages.

On the other side, the timeline and the layers for the graphical part are extremely appealing. I have not seen an equivalent in Java. Think about kind of Swing components that you could drag and drop and organize on your page in overlapping layers and define how they can be animated. Included an amazing color editor that supports shading and transparency. You rapidly become addicted to it.

Honestly, I find such graphical features are missing to Java SE and development environments. I think that, as the wind is pushing for richer clients, it might be wise to include also extended graphical and multimedia capabilities in the standard Java edition.

Anyone else willing to push that with me?

Exactly one month ago, most of us were in the Metropolis @ the conference attending one of the presentations, participating in BOF's, talking to one of the partners or sharing thoughts with other attendees. But it isn't quite finished yet! Robin made the very cool JavaPolis Media Player and Robin and Stephan have finished encoding all the streams we recorded. This means that everything will be online shortly and that you will be able to order the DVD's also. I can assure you that it looks really great!

So, what's next?

Well, first of all, BeJUG (as most of you know, this is the JUG behind JavaPolis) started organizing new events for this year. The first event will be a view on Java from a different angle, that also deserves its place in the spotlights. Just follow the link above to see what I mean .

Secondly, we are interested to know which speakers you want to see at the next conference! Are there any methodologies, frameworks, libraries, products (commercial or open source), ... you want to know more about? Tell us by adding a comment to this blog and we will see what we can do! Keep in mind that we are quite strict in who may speak at the conference. We prefer people who do not only work in the field, but also made contributions one way or the other by writing articles and/or books or by playing an important role in the design and/or implementation of a framework, library, product,...
This is not a call for paper! I am just curious in what you are interested ...

Hope to hear from you!

As of today, registered JavaPolis wiki users can test run three JavaPolis presentations; Hibernate in Action, Pragmatic Groovy and the Java Puzzlers !!
Login to our wiki and go to our JavaPolis Media overview page where you can find the related links.

Below you can find a small screen shot of how each presentation page looks like.
On each presentation page you can post related comments and/or questions and you can also rate and download the talk!

We'll also move and update our JavaPolis Speaker Gallery, so JavaPolians can use this flash app to kick-start a presentation.

Keep in mind that this is still a beta test where JavaLobby is monitoring the load and continues to configure the current setup (Thanks JavaLobby !)
More presentations will follow in the very near future, so stay tuned and make sure that you've turned-on your daily email wiki. (See wiki profile)

Enjoy,
Stephan
PS: The JavaPolis DVD will be ready around the end of february!

Today was like another day until I got the Javalobby newsletter of today in my mailbox.
Rick Ross telling us that we have started to fuel the Possible Biggest Java Conference Ever?
It actually took some time before I finally waked up and have realized that, yes, the videos of Javapolis were on-line.
Will the world be really different now?
Hum, for me yes, finally, I will stop reworking, watching and encoding videos at night and during the week-ends. I will stop doing Flash development and move back to Java. I think that Stefan will agree with me that we need some rest (at least for a week or two)...
Maybe the impact for the Java community is more interesting. Would not you expect now the same level of service from other Java conferences for the same price? Definitely!

Many thanks to Rick, Matt for believing that we would be able to do it and having supported us in that unreasonable adventure
We are shaking the Java community and that is cool!

You will find Javapolis videos here

Robin