RMOUG Training Days 2013 Presentations Announced: A Mobile Emphasis

The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) has announced the presentations to be given at Training Days 2013. As shown on that page, I will be presenting "Charting Oracle Database Data with JavaFX and Groovy." The abstract for my presentation as shown on the conference materials is shown next:

JavaFX 2.x makes generation and display of data-powered charts powerful and straightforward. JavaFX’s simple APIs allow data sets to be used to create numerous types of charts including pie charts, bar charts, line charts, area charts, bubble charts, and more. JavaFX also supports dynamic charts that are automatically updated when the underlying data changes. With JavaFX poised to become part of Java SE, it is destined to be a standardized technology that is readily available in many environments.

Groovy is a dynamic scripting language that also runs on the JVM and can be used to write concise but powerful scripts. Groovy makes retrieving data from a database relatively painless and is much easier to use than even JDBC. Groovy’s XML parsing is also similarly easy to use and makes Groovy an ideal language for parsing XML to generate charts. JavaFX and Groovy together make it easy to write simple scripts that easily create visually impressive charting results. JavaFX and Groovy can be used with other Java/JVM-based libraries to generate these charts in various medium from websites to desktop clients to PDFs.

I also intend to discuss in this presentation an obvious topic when discussing use of JavaFX and Groovy together: GroovyFX.

One of the major themes of this year's RMOUG Training Days 2013 conference appears to be developing mobile applications, either with Oracle Application Express (APEX) or with Oracle ADF Mobile. The main Oracle web page on Oracle ADF Mobile describes it as "an HTML5 and Java mobile development framework that enables developers to build and extend enterprise applications for iOS and Android from a single code base" and is "based on a hybrid mobile architecture" and "supports access to native device services." The following are some of the sessions at RMOUG Training Days 2013 that are obviously covering mobile application development with Oracle ADF Mobile or with APEX.

• Mobile Integration through Oracle Technologies
  • Objectives and outline indicate this session will cover general mobile development with Oracle technologies.
  • Jordan Braunstein, Visual Integrator Consulting
• Oracle ADF – The No Slides Overview
  • "See how far you can get with Oracle ADF in one hour of building web and mobile applications."
  • Shay Shmeltzer, Oracle Corporation
• Develop Compelling On-Device Mobile Apps – The Simpler Way
  • "This session will discuss and demonstrate developing an on-device mobile application using the technologies and tools you are familiar with: JDeveloper, Java, and ADF Mobile, without writing a single line of device-native code. You can deploy this single code base to both iOS and Android-based devices."
  • Joe Huang, Oracle Corporation
• ADF Mobile eCourse Pilot
  • "Through interactive presentation and hands-on exercises, you’ll examine the principles to consider when designing mobile applications, as well as understand the road map for developing them."
  • Lynn Munsinger, Oracle Corporation
• Bring Your iPads! (Because You’re Gonna Build a Mobile APEX App in One Hour!)
  • "Oracle Application Express integrates very easily with JQuery Mobile and this combination can be used to create mobile applications that are supported on a wide range of mobile devices relatively simple."
  • Chris Ostrowski, Avout
• Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Application Express
  • "This session provides an overview of the basics of jQuery mobile, explains how it is integrated with Oracle Application Express, and discusses how customers can quickly build mobile web applications and extend their existing Oracle Application Express applications with mobile capabilities."
  • David Peake, Oracle Corporation

RMOUG Training Days 2013 looks to have a plethora of database-related presentations as normal, but several of them are focused on MySQL as well as the Oracle database. I will likely try to attend as many of the mobile application development sessions as I can and look forward to presenting on generating charts for data using JavaFX and Groovy.

RMOUG Training Days 2013 will be held 11-13 February 2012 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado.

Questions at My RMOUG Training Days 2012 Presentation on JavaFX 2

I presented "JavaFX 2.0: Java in the Rich Internet Application Space" at RMOUG Training Days 2012 earlier this week. After many years of presenting at technical conferences, I've decided that one of the best indicators of how well I did in my presentation is the types of questions I get from attendees. If I get no questions, it is more likely that I've confused, lost, or bored people than that I covered all possible questions. If I get really basic questions asking about things I already covered, it means I either messed that part of the presentation up or that I simply forgot to cover that thoroughly. When I get relevant questions that seem to pick up where my presentation left off or that demonstrate the attendee asking a question to apply what I've presented to an individual situation, I know that I've been able to provide what I had hoped to provide. The questions from attendees at my presentation this week fell into that last category. They were excellent questions.

In this post, I repeat (paraphrase) the questions (thanks Bill for recording them!) I was asked and provide answers to those questions. In most cases, I answer here pretty much the same way that I answered at the presentation (but with links here). One exception is my answer to the question about JavaFX 3D support, which has much more information provided in the answer in this post than I could provide at the presentation.

Q: What does JavaFX have for layout managers related to Swing and CSS?

One of the points I made in my presentation is that JavaFX 2 does a nice job of supporting industry standards such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). An insightful attendee asked the question of whether JavaFX 2 uses Swing-like layout managers for layout or uses CSS for layout. My answer was that I had mostly seen (and had only used) JavaFX 2's layout panes for layout and I described these as akin to Swing's layout managers. I added that I have typically seen CSS used in JavaFX 2 applications for styling elements more than for layout purposes. CSS can be used to style many elements of the scene graph including nodes and even layouts. CSS can affect the layout panes by styling things such as padding and borders.

The document Working With Layouts in JavaFX (PDF) provides a nice introduction to JavaFX 2 layout techniques. JavaFX2.0 Layout: A Class Tour is another nice introduction to layout in JavaFX 2. Skinning JavaFX Applications with CSS (PDF) is a nice introduction to using CSS with JavaFX 2.

Q: What Does JavaFX Provide for Database Access?

With hindsight, I probably should have addressed JavaFX in context of database access at a conference that is heavily oriented to the Oracle Database. I suggested that because JavaFX is now "pure Java," it can easily be used with JDBC, favorite Java ORM tools (including JPA implementations), or other database-access goodies in alternative JVM languages such as Groovy.

I mentioned that the JavaFX community appears to be growing and its ecosystem is growing rapidly. I stated that I had just read this week about DataFX, "a project that intends to make retrieving, massaging, populating, viewing, and editing data in JavaFX UI controls easier." Although I have not used DataFX (currently at version 0.0.5), this may be something of interest for those wanting easier integration of data sources and JavaFX UI controls. The JavaOne 2011 slides for JavaFX Datasources: Getting Real-World Data into JavaFX Controls provide introductory details regarding DataFX.

Q: Will JavaFX become incorporated into ADF?

This question reminded my of a question that I too have had. Although I did not specifically wonder if Oracle would incorporate JavaFX into their Application Developer Framework, I have wondered if Oracle would incorporate JavaFX 2 into their products in general (believe they will) and into NetBeans (and NetBeans Rich Client Platform) in particular (less certain of this). I responded as such and said that I could only speculate, but that I hoped that they would incorporate JavaFX and gradually replace components that are heavily Swing-based with JavaFX. Given the statements at JavaOne 2011 regarding JavaFX essentially replacing Swing as the client-side UI technology, this would seem logical. It will obviously take quite some time to make this happen.

The post Oracle ADF and JavaFX demonstrates running "a JavaFX applet within an ADF application."

Q: Is there any out-of-box support for JavaFX 3D?

I mentioned in my slides that JavaFX 2 provides built-in and customizable 2D shapes. In response to the question related to JavaFX 2's 3D support, I responded that I wasn't aware of any existing JavaFX 2 API support for 3D graphics.

It appears that support for "3D primitives" has been anticipated for JavaFX 2.1. A Richard Bair podcast (Java Spotlight Episode 16) provides more information on the need to have Java 7 for applet (plugin) delivery changes to support Prism and 3D more fully. Under the section titled "New Features Proposed for JavaFX," the JavaFX 2 Roadmap has a sub-section called "3D Graphics Support" that states, "JavaFX will feature support for 3D graphics that can be leveraged for modern forms of data visualization and advanced user experience."

In addition, there are some other common practices for achieving 3D effects in JavaFX 2.0. These include use of Java 3D and using 2D shapes with creative animation to simulate 3D effects. Other good online resources related to JavaFX and 3D support (which JavaFX 1.x had) include 3D with JavaFX, Java 3D™ meets JavaFX™, 3D Capabilities in JavaFX 1.3 Release, JavaFX 2.0 for 3D Website, and Early reports on JavaFX 2 are in.

More JavaFX 2 Recent News

Because this is a JavaFX-oriented post, it seems appropriate to include references to some new online JavaFX content. Jonathan Giles announced that More of the JavaFX Scenegraph open sourced and he references specifically javafx-ui-common in the OpenJFX project.

The Apress page for the forthcoming book Pro JavaFX 2: A Definitive Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology now states the publication date of this book as 7 March 2012. The Java-Buddy blog is featuring a series of numerous blog posts with simple JavaFX 2.0 examples and demonstrations.

Conclusion

I appreciated the great questions from attendees at my JavaFX 2 presentation at RMOUG Training Days 2012. They were such great questions that I thought it worth writing this post to summarize those questions and my best answers for those questions. I'm looking forward to the imminent release of Pro JavaFX 2 and am happy to see more of JavaFX open sourced and to see more JavaFX code examples online.

RMOUG Training Days 2012 Schedule Available

RMOUG Training Days 2012 will be held February 14-16, 2012, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado. The RMOUG web site has many details about the conference including a high-level agenda, Schedule-at-a-Glance, list of presenters, and list of sessions.

In what has become a recent tradition, the first afternoon of Tuesday, February 14, features University Sessions. Although these University Sessions require a separate fee beyond the normal conference registration price, Oracle is offering a free Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Developer Day for the full day on Tuesday, February 14. They are offering multiple sessions including presentations on the "Java Track" such as "Simpler Enterprise Java Development with Oracle" and "Developing with JDBC, UCP, and Java in the Database." Other tracks include Oracle Application Express Track, Database Development Track, and .NET Track.

The main technical sessions at RMOUG Training Days 2012 occur on Wednesday and Thursday, February 15-16. There appears to be up to 13 sessions offered in each time slot for lots of choice in what to attend. Below is a list of some of the sessions that seem particularly interesting to me.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

• "MySQL Security Essentials" (Ronald Bradford, Session 1)
• "Leveraging the Full Power of the Oracle XML DB Repository" (Mark Drake, Session 2)
• "Oracle XML Database - Design Concepts for XML Applications that Will Perform!" (Marco Gralike , Session 3)
• "End-to-End Java: Decide When to Adopt Java in the Database and Best Practices" (Kuassi Mensah, Session 3)
• "Beyond SQL: The No SQL and Not Only SQL Movements" (Marshall Presser, Session 5)
• "Difficult Decisions" (Steven Wille, Session 6)

Thursday, February 16, 2012

• "How Cloud Computing will Change your Career, Life, and Bedtime Routine" (Jordan Braunstein, Session 7)
• "Service Oriented Architecture: How it Works and How to Implement it Successfully" (Robert Mason, Session 7)
• "Things Developers Wish Managers Knew and Managers Wish Developers Knew" (Bill Jackson, Session 8)
• "JavaFX 2.0: Java in the Rich Internet Application Space" (Dustin Marx, Session 9)
• "Ruby and Oracle. You’re Going to Like the Way it Makes You Code" (George Thrower, Session 9)
• "NoSQL Deep Dive" (Gwen Shapira, Session 10)
• "Forms to Struts 2, Spring and Hibernate: Value & Gotchas" (Jigar Parsana, Session 11)

With 13 concurrent sessions offered in each of the 11 sessions slots, there are nearly 150 presentations to see at RMOUG Training Days 2012 along with the keynote presentation. Understandably, many of them cover database-oriented, DBA-oriented, and Oracle-oriented topics such as Oracle EBS R12, Oracle Exalogic, high availability, joins, indexes, SQL, RAC, TOAD, replication, performance, optimization, Fusion, and so forth.

Speaking at RMOUG Training Days 2012

The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) has announced that the keynote speaker at RMOUG Training Days 2012 will be Cary Millsap of Method R Consulting. RMOUG Training Days 2012 are scheduled for 14-16 February 2012 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado.

I will be speaking at this conference. I will be sole presenter of "JavaFX 2.0: Java in the Rich Internet Application Space" and will be a co-presenter of "Things Developers Wish Managers Knew and Managers Wish Developers Knew." I look forward to returning to the Colorado Convention Center for another edition of RMOUG Training Days.