A Grand Slam in Baseball, is a home run hit, when each of the three bases is occupied by a runner, thus scoring four runs. The Grand Slam of Ultrarunning is recognition for those who complete in four of the oldest 100 mile trail runs in the U.S. And in Tennis, the Grand Slam describes the four Grand Slam tournaments, also called Majors, the most important annual tennis events.
A few years back, we came up with our very own definition of a Grand Slam, the Code Camp Grand Slam, which would recognize those who had spoken at four distinct Code Camps, during one calendar year. After having fallen short for the last two years, speaking at only three venues, Tom and I finally completed the four Code Camps in a single year Grand Slam.
Android – UI, for phones and tablets
Sometimes front-loading still makes sense, but be aware of agile doctrinaires. With not even 1 percent of Android devices running Android 3.x i.e. qualifying as Android Tablets, you may have a hard time explaining why you would want to put in the extra work and make you Android app look great and feel right on a cool Android Tablet like the Motorola Xoom or the Samsung Tab 10.1. However, I still think it’s well worse the effort. There are less apps optimized for the tablets and users will appreciate your work even more, praising your app loudly, so loud that even Android phone users will eventually hear it.
Following Jeff Peacock’s Android 101 talk, I recently had the opportunity to talk about Android UI for Tablets. Talking for more than two hours straight in a cramped room, sometimes kneeling on the floor entering code, might not look enjoyable to you, but if you have ever attended a CodeCamp you know that this is how these events sometimes work. Moreover, it’s always extra exciting, presenting all new content, and I had worked on code and slides for the “Android UI for Phones and Tablets” until the early morning hours. So it was a great to see so many developers exited about Android and Android Tablets for that matter.
Read MoreArtistic Android
It’s that time a year again, when SoCal developers gather at USCD, to learn from their peers. It’s SoCal Code Camp time at UC San Diego. Join me on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 4:00 PM at SoCal Code – UC San Diego for some Android finger painting printing fun.
Read MoreTurning the Web on its head – let’s have the server call the client
Code Camp is not just for geeks, hackers, and code monkeys; and while you may find some of them at the University of Southern California on November 21 and 22, Code Camp is first and foremost a place for software developers to come together, share ideas and experiences, and learn from their peers.
This will be my 2nd LA Code Camp, which compared to the Code Camp up North at Cal State Fullerton, seems more focused on Microsoft and .net related technologies. However, I’m pretty sure this topic will fill a room: Turning the Web on its head – let’s have the server call the client.
Sounds interesting and a couple of implementation ideas may come to mind. After looking briefly into some xml and binary web service protocols, we will take a closer look at the notification mechanism, provided by Java’s management extensions and eventually take a really close look at a full featured implementation of the above mentioned problem.
Interestingly, even when looking at both, the client and the server part of this solution, there isn’t really all that much code to write, which means that even in the little time we have, all the concept and patterns used, can be looked at and discussed. Honestly, all the code, (client and server) that makes this ‘Stock Quote Client’ an event-consumer, instead of a stupid poller, will be shown.
- SoCal Code Camp Los Angeles
- Wolf Paulus: Turning the Web on its head – let’s have the server call the client
- Keywords: Tomcat, Push, non-blocking I/O, JMX, Java, Hessian, Comet, AJAX
- November 21 and 22,
We will take the accepted view that a Web-Client calls (via HTTP GET or POST) a server and turn it on its head. Let’s have the server call the client. It is really not that far fetched, to imaging a scenario where the server, when it has determined that something exciting just happened (e.g., the Dow Jones Industrial Avg. Index jumped 100 points) calls the Web Client, instead of clients constantly polling the server (even when the DOW barely moves).
Read MoreBy Developers For Developers
It’s Code Camp time again in Southern California and lots of Coders, Programers, Engineers, Geeks, and Hackers will meet at the California State University Fullerton this coming Saturday and Sunday, January 24 and 25.
Code Camp is a community driven event for developers of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines – well that’s the idea at least. Looking at the session table, one cannot shake the feeling that .net, asp.net, Azure and Silverlight seem a little over represented – but there are also a couple platform independent, embedded, and Java specific talks scheduled as well.
My sessions: Turning a WiFi Router into a general-purpose Network Device and Java UI Generation at Runtime with SwiXML have been scheduled to take place on Saturday, before dinner. I hope to see you Saturday afternoon at the CSFU Campus in H-123 … when you Twitter about the event, please use #SoCalCodeCamp in your tweet so we can track.
Turning a WiFi Router into a general-purpose Network Device
CSFU Campus, H 123, Sat. 01/24/2009, 3:45 – 5:00 PM
Embedded systems are increasingly present in our life and quite a few of them can be repurposed (a.k.a. hacked), to make them even more useful.
The purpose of this session is to have fun and give you some inside of what’s involved in turning a $30 wireless router into a general purpose embedded network device, running the LINUX OS and a full featured Java Runtime environment.
We will take a closer look at some popular Router OS distributions, like OpenWrt, DD-WRT, FreeWRT, Tomato, or X-Wrt and show how to flash the Fonera (FON) WiFi router with a vanilla OpenWrt distribution. The FON is a very small, relatively simple, and inexpensive router, built on the AR531x/231x Atheros WiSoC (Wireless System-on-a-Chip) with an integrated 32-bit MIPS R4000-class processor running at 183.5 MHz, comes with 8 Mbytes Flash Memory and 16 MByte RAM. In short, it has all the attributes required to be added our digital playground.
Embedded OS Development / Kernel Architecture, Implementation and port for Embedded Systems
OpenWrt is a Linux distribution optimized especially for embedded devices and surprisingly, the OpenWrt kernel configuration is done with the help of a character based UI. OpenWrt also comes with a lightweight package management system (IPKG or more recently OPKG), meaning that features that have not already been built into the kernel, can be added later, at runtime. As an example, we will take a look at how a JavaVM could be built, packaged, and deployed, or built directly into the kernel.
Java UI Generation at Runtime with SwiXML
CSFU Campus, H 123, Sat. 01/24/2009, 2:30 – 3:45 AM
SwiXML is a small GUI generating engine for Java applications and applets. Graphical User Interfaces are described in XML documents that are parsed at runtime and rendered into javax.swing objects. Theoretically, you can look at SwiXML as an XML based domain-specific language, allowing to declare Java Swing GUIs. The SwiXML engine will then later at runtime, take a GUI declaration and create that User-Interface on the fly, just like a Web Browser would do with an HTML document.
SwiXML doesn’t introduce any new layout managers or component classes. Instead, it operates directly on the Swing component classes using introspection.
About Me
My name is Wolf Paulus, a photographer, hiker, hacker, technologist based in Ramona, California.
I'm currently working on Android projects, occasionally speak at developer conferences, and work on open source projects (Swixml, HessDroid, …).
You can contact me by email or via gTalk at wolf@wolfpaulus.com
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