My Blogs Sandeep Konchady's Weblog

Finally JavaOne 2009 is over. A lot of excitement in the floor, keynotes and exhibits. Being behind the scene for most of the keynotes, now I realize the importance of testing the demos and testing them again and again. You first need to please the demo gods before you can go on the stage to setup . 

There were a lot of interesting questions at the Utopia lounge on JavaFX. Some related to technology, maturity of the product and tools, some related to testing, and support. I think our roadmap should answer most of these questions and you can always ask JavaFX marketing for more clarification at javafx-interest-AT-sun-DOT-com. As part of JavaFX team, we perform a lot of testing and use existing tools with some modification to accommodate JavaFX testing needs. Authoring tool was something a lot of people were interested in. This is how JavaFX will bridge the gap between developers and designers.

The most exciting experience that I had at Utopia was when a 10 year old kid came by and asked - "What is this and how can I build it". Now that is the audience we can get interesting feedback from. Talking of which, I am excited to announce the commencement of first school taught course on JavaFX. This will be taught at San Jose State University, California this summer (CMPE-297). Nearly 25 students have registered, and will be the first set if industry candidates ready to explore, develop and spread JavaFX in the industry. The tools we teach the students are the ones they will use in the industry and will proliferate as they improve their skills in this area.

I also wanted to acknowledge Sophia for her phenomenal contribution to solving PIETheory.com challenges at her web site and all you folks who have made it your goal to solve the challenges and learn JavaFX in the process.

Have you heard of P.I.E network. Have you heard about a strange phenomena occurring on the net. Follow the clue and see what you uncover.

JavaFX 1.1.1 is live at javafx.com. Fixes mainly involve platform stability for FLV playback on Mac, and handling of unsupported FLVs on both Windows and Mac platforms.

JavaFX SDK has a lot of features and among them the best one I like is the media. It allows me to play my favorite media in a player that has my style. A sample code to play a media with bare bones player could look something like this:

---

/*

* PlayVideo.fx

*

* Created on 31 Jul, 2008
*/


import javafx.ext.swing.*;

import javafx.scene.paint.*;

import javafx.scene.geometry.*;

import javafx.scene.media.*;

import javafx.scene.text.*;

import javafx.scene.*;

import java.lang.*;

import javafx.input.*;


public class PlayVideo {

   private attribute mediaURL = "{__DIR__}MySampleMedia.wmv";


   private attribute player:MediaPlayer = MediaPlayer {

       media: Media {

           source: mediaURL;

       }

       autoPlay: false

       repeatCount: MediaPlayer.REPEAT_FOREVER

   }

   attribute frame:SwingFrame = SwingFrame {

       content: Canvas {

           content: [

               MediaView {

                   mediaPlayer: player

               },

               Group {

                   content: [

                       Rectangle {

                           width: 100

                           height: 50

                           fill: Color.GRAY

                           onMousePressed: function(e:MouseEvent):Void {

                               player.play();

                           }

                       },

                       Text {

                           content: "Play"

                           fill: Color.WHITE

                           translateX: 36

                           translateY: 34

                       }

                   ]

                   translateX: 110

                   translateY: 190

               }

           ]

       }

       visible: true

       closeAction: function() {

           player.pause();

           frame.close();

           System.exit(0);

       }

       title: "Close window to exit"

   }

}

var app:PlayVideo = PlayVideo{}

---

 You should be able to play most media on Windows that is not DRM protected or from CD/DVD tray.

A lot of teams have put in long hours and deep thoughts to make this release. Finally the preview release of JavaFX SDK that was promised during JaveOne 2008 is finally out at http://javafx.com/. Check it out and feel free to provide your feedback and comments in the forums. The SDK has support for a lot of features such as drag-out applet if you are using JDK 1.6.0_10 (6 upadte 10), media capability and the usual transformation of rendered object. While you are there, check out the demos and sample code too.

Parth, Vivek, and Sahil from San Jose State University podcasted their MS project at this year's JavaOne at the java.net community corner. Thanks in part to Gary and Marla who made this possible. Srinivasan who is the architect for OpenESB component of Mural mentored these students with idea and direction. You can check out all about this project when you listen to their podcast.

 

 

 

 

 

At JavaOne 2008, Professor Dan Harkey from San Jose State University and Professor Leigh Jin from San Francisco State University met members from java.net, Mural, and Glass Fish to discuss collaboration between Sun and their respective universities. I got a chance to be part of this discussion. In this pic below you can see Satya Dodda, Judy Tang, and Gopal from Glass Fish quality community talking to the rest of the group.

 

In this pic below you can see Jagdesh from Glass Fish quality, Marla and Gary behind her from java.net with her signature hat, Himani a MS student from SJSU, Srinivasan architect for OpenESB from Mural, Dr. Daniel Harkey from San Jose State University. You can also see Dr. Leigh Jin from San Francisco State University listening to Satya speak.

 

 

We all met at java.net community corner and had a very productive meeting. Among the things we discussed were

1. How schools can better collaborate with Sun to use practices and technologies that are currently in use in the industry
2. How Sun can leverage the research schools are doing and evaluate next generation methodologies and practices

As a follow up to this meeting, you will see a new and exciting set of programs and resources specifically for students. We do not have a timeline for this yet, but be on the lookout. Finally, Himani, Shivani, and Tanushree presented this poster that showcases student project that was mentored by Srinivasan's group from Mural community.

If you have been active on the OpenJDK aliases, I guess this is no news to you. If not, you may be wondering why you are not able to build OpenJDK 6 or 7 on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (HH). Well, there is one issue that was identified as the main blocker for getting a clean build on HH - default shell invoked has some issue with the way OpenJDK is generating java files from templates. The solution, which is a hack at this point in time, is to hard code the shell to use /bin/bash. The changes related to this are documented in the icedtea changeset a5c32475a2e8. When I tried this patch, it was not the only thing I had to change to get the build going on HH, though it was a good start. Here are some of the things I did:

1. In jdk/make/java/nio/ edit Makefile to replace all $(SH) with /bin/bash
2. Replace all #!/bin/sh at the top of the *.sh files with #!/bin/bash

With these two changes, I was able to get a clean build. Hope this helps

 

Some time ago I had blogged about how Sun has open source projects that under grad and grad students from computer science and engineering discipline can work on. Each of these projects, if accepted, will be mentored under the architect of that group and led to completion. Today I would like to highlight our first milestone: San Jose State University and Sun are working on projects for MS students from software engineering department. There are two teams of three working on Sun's OpenESB/JBI project that is hosted as Mural on java.net.

The project that is offered to SJSU students is led by Srinivasan Rangarajan who is the architect for OpenESB. The two projects being worked on are:

1. Parallelizing of ETL based on system profile (Himani Goel, Shivani Tripathi and Tanushree)
2. Supporting mobile interface to OpenESB engine as part of enterprise data mashup (Vivek Modi, Sahil Chokshi and Parth Vora)

The program is managed from SJSU's side by director of software engineering department Dr. Dan Harkey. If you want to see these students in action, visit Community Corner at 2008 JavaOne. One of the team is presenting a poster and the other team is presenting a talk/demo on mobile interface to enterprise data mashup. If any of you students or universities want to participate in similar program, please contact me Sandeep Konchady.

A while ago I posted a blog about Sun sponsoring industry focused projects for graduate students. This is a continuation of the same. I am happy to announce that we have taken this to the next step. Starting this quarter there are three teams from San Jose State University working one-on-one with Sun to collaborate on Sun sponsored open source projects. These projects range from research oriented topics to new feature implementation. Of the many areas where students can work, current projects are focused on OpenESB and JBI located at https://mural.dev.java.net/.

Since we have this pilot program off the ground, I would like to send an open invitation to other universities to collaborate on open source projects with Sun Microsystems. Sun being one of the biggest contributor to open source, has the best advantage for graduate and under graduate students. These projects need not end when school ends. Each student can own a module and be part of the open source community beyond school and exercise his/her passion.
 

This blog is more of an open question rather than my views. As most companies look towards virtualization for their testing needs, there are many options to consider and selecting one over the other is getter harder by the minute. Most virtualization softwares have comparable features and administration capabilities. However the question that I am really looking to answer is:

1. How stable are these virtualization softwares for testing drivers. Do they behave similar to native host or exactly as local host.
2. How reasonable is it to run performance tests using virtual servers.
3. How does Solaris Zones compare to Xen/VMware for Linux/Solaris testing. Which of the two emulate native system better.

I am also looking for user experience from folks who have used and are using virtualization for GUI and SMP testing, specifically related to Java. I would appreciate any comments and gotchas you may have for potential users who are looking for this solution.

 

I am currently pursuing my masters in software engineering at San Jose
State University (SJSU), California. As a part of my curriculum I need
to either work on a thesis or a project to complete my course. Both of
these options can be research oriented or industry focused. Since I
have a bit of experience in the industry, I would rather do an industry
oriented project rather than research oriented ones. I know I am not
the only one with this thought and SJSU is not the only school that has
these options. So I would like to make this information available to
all schools so that students and future employees of Sun Microsystems,
Inc (SMI) can benefit from learning interesting technologies and also
experience what it is to work on open source projects sponsored by SMI.

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Scripts have their upside and downside. When I downloaded OpenJDK and wanted to build it, I had to read the FAQ to see what packages are needed, how to setup minimal environment variables required to build OpenJDK and where is the master Makefile. So after some trial and error, some very useful blogs and FAQ I installed all the packages needed and build sanity passed. I want to make some modifications to the workspace, and perform regular builds. Do I set up the environment variables and run the build command every time?

 To make my life easier, this is what I did (Specifically on x86 Ubuntu 7.04)

#!/bin/sh
#
# Set ALT environment variables
#
export ALT_CLOSED_JDK_IMPORT_PATH=/Projects/OpenJKD/openjdk/jdk1.7.0
export ALT_BOOTDIR=/opt/jdk1.6.0_01/
export ALT_MOTIF_DIR=/usr/OpenMotif-2.1.31

#
# Build OpenJDK
#
cd control/make
make ARCH_DATA_MODEL=32

Hope this helps someone, and if anyone has a better script that automates checking of missing packages and install them on Ubuntu along with this build script, that would be really great. Any takers?

The other day I was curious to see what the hype was about Ubuntu. So I downloaded Ubuntu desktop and installed it on my Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop with nVidia display card and Atheros Wifi. I have previously installed Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, OpenSuSE with absolutely no issues with display driver and expected the same from Ubuntu. To my surprise the only way I could login to this system was in single user mode. Xserver just would not come up because of missing driver. I understand that nVidia is not an open source product and needs to be explicitly downloaded and installed. So how on earth does one go about doing this when all you have is a secured Wifi network (which I presume is the case in most homes).

 

Yes this was my biggest problem. I searched all the support aliases, Ubuntu FAQs, and other resources, but did not find a simple script that allowed me to connect online to Wifi network  using command line. So here I am putting what I struggled for over two days to configure. I hope this helps some folks out there having similar problems.

sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifdown ath0
sudo iwconfig ath0 mode managed
sudo iwconfig ath0 channel 11
sudo iwconfig ath0 essid <Your ESSID>
sudo iwconfig ath0 key <Your Security Key> (Leave blank if this is an open unsecured network)
sudo ifup ath0
sudo ifconfig ath0

Once you connect to your Wifi network, you can now download one of the nVidia drivers depending on the version of display card you have. You can find details on how to get the version of your display at Ubunty FAQ. Once you get your driver installed you can now login using GNOME or KDE which ever you've installed.

Today is a exciting day for us in the Java SE organization.  We completed open sourcing of JDK as promised - OpenJDK.
What is even more exciting for me is the fact that we are not only open
in opening up our source, but we are transparent in what we do, how we
do it and what it looks like. What is am referring to is the OpenJDK Quality portal. Have you seen the "Metrics"
section. We are not shy to say that we have bugs in our code, but we
encourage the community to participate, find more bugs and perhaps even
suggest a fix.

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