|
"Stop What You're Doing - I'm Going on Vacation"
A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of going on a wonderful vacation: taking in the beautiful sites and weather, getting away from it all, and to top it all off, getting engaged. As anyone will tell you, taking a break from the usual and mundane to go on a vacation always sharpens your focus; combining that with such a momentous occasion has really given me a great refreshed perspective now that I'm coming back into the wired-in-world. As is always the case, however, the world kept on spinning while I was gone, and seems to have been spinning even faster since I got back.
The Phoenix Rises Again
Building a website for a product that is meant to be 'everything and nothing at all' is a surprisingly difficult task when you get into the nitty gritty details. As the Eclipse foundation continues to grow, and the diversity of what Eclipse can do expands, the home on the web for Eclipse continues to need re-thinking. This hasn't discouraged the Eclipse webmasters however, who are attacking the problem with renewed fervor with the new Eclipse homepage beta. They are very interested in community feedback, so be sure to check it out.
Walking on Broken Glass
(Sorry for cheesy Annie Lennox title reference)
Big in the Java universe this week is the state of Java GUIs on Vista. This was covered recently on Javalobby: Java applications on both sides of the GUI toolkit fence (Swing and SWT) are causing recent builds of Windows Vista to completely shut off the next-generation aero-glass composition rendering (the transparency effects and all those goodies). Ray Cromwell provides an excellent post over on Javalobby that covers the technical reasons why this happens, but long story short, it's intentionally being shut off by Windows Vista simply because of the way that Java window toolkits are drawing to the screen.
Dmitri Trembovetski has explained the current state of affairs for Java 2D/Swing, clarifying that Java 6 plays nicely with Vista, allaying the fears of many Java developers - but keep in mind this isn't only a Swing problem; as I posted here, the problem was reproduced with Eclipse and Azureus which are both SWT applications. The SWT developers are working on Vista integration as we speak (as tracked by Bug 154116), so it's likely we'll have a solution long before Vista releases to consumers (sometime in January), although we aren't expecting another final SWT release until next Summer - so it will probably be in the form of a milestone release (with a potential backport to 3.2).
Santa Clara, Here We Come
While it seems like EclipseCon just ended not all that long ago, EclipseCon 2007 is right around the corner (March 5th - March 8th), and the call for participation has gone out. As with everything Eclipse, the participation is becoming more open and transparent to the community, with the current submissions being taken and voted upon through EclipseZilla (the Eclipse BugZilla system) - all of the instructions are available here.
While I don't know my current schedule, I hope to be able to see you in Santa Clara.
Until Next Time,
RJ Lorimer
rj@javalobby.org
|