WidgetFX is an open-source desktop widget platform written in the JavaFX Script language. It takes advantage of the latest features in the Java Consumer JRE and runs on all major platforms including Windows XP/Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X.

How to instrument classes (using java.lang.instrument.Instrumentation) in a regular java program.

Today is a big day, without discussing competing architectures, Intel is publicly unveiling, for the first time, the basis of its Larrabee GPU architecture.

Let's look at some compiled JavaFX Script code that is slightly more sophisticated than a typical Hello World program. This will give you a taste for how you can easily create compiled JavaFX programs that contain UI components and 2D graphics.

I don't know of a full design for JVM continuations, yet, but it's possible to observe both the easy and the hard parts, and to survey some of the reasons we should care.

For the first time, I really understood what it means to be a blue-collar language. In a blue-collar language, the rules are always simple and straightforward. If something doesn't work, there is a clear error message, either at compile-time or at run-time. Overall, Java did a great job with that.

This week several of us from Sun attended the Lang.NET Symposium. Charles Nutter and yours truly introduced the Da Vinci Machine project.

It's not my favourite language (I don't really have one. All languages suck. It's just that some of them suck less in interesting ways), but it has a lot I like. Here's a brain dump of some of it.

What are JavaFX Script, JavaFX Mobile, and JavaFX Designer?

At long last, Sun is planning to address the Number One problem with Java applets - slow startup during which time the browser locks up.

Thus far I’ve tried to argue that Scala is a functional programming language that is also very pragmatic for real-world work. I think any Java developer who’s looking for something more sophisticated but doesn’t want to give up their development environment or their current toolchain should take a very serious, hard look at what Scala has to offer.

Like a flash, something that has probably been in my mind for years now hit me like a ton of proverbial bricks! The reason why my 3 favorite programming languages failed is that their names sucked ass!

Well, our new NetBeans book is not finished, but available in "rough cut" form. If you've ever wondered about writing NetBeans plug-ins or how you can architect a large, extensible application and have it actually work, I hope this will be a resource.

What programming language did God use to create the universe?

Tuples are great. Every language should have them.

The third edition of OpenGL Pipeline, the quarterly newsletter covering all things the OpenGL standards body has “in the pipeline”, covers a bunch of exciting news and tips: from updates about OpenGL “Longs Peak” to a first glimpse of the new OpenGL 2.1 SDK to OpenGL running on Vista.

I spent a while this evening reading through the documentation for the beta release of NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU system. The programming model that these GPUs enforce is incredibly complex. It’s more than a little reminiscent of the Connection Machine.

All-in-all, I think Groovy in Action is among the top five Manning books. For me personally, it's also a perception changing and influential book.

And then something happened. I don’t know exactly when, but patents — especially software patents — have gone off the rails. It took 46 years to reach the 10,000th American patent, but today, there are more than 10,000 patents granted every three weeks. Perhaps patents could be given out as Cracker Jack prizes—after all, the US Patent and Trademark Office already approves more patents per year than boxes of Cracker Jacks sold at Dodger Stadium each year. Are design patents helping or hurting developers? Where do we draw the line?

Understanding Tradeoffs in Software Transactional Memory by Nir Shavit and myself was accepted in CGO-2007. The paper describes the TL1 (Transactional Locking) mechanism.

One of the facilities of javax.script API is script Bindings. Through the javax.script.Bindings interface, you can expose your application objects as global variables to your scripts. Ideally, you want to access global variables by the same name as key names in Bindings. But, there are some language specific complications in exposing global variables.

Soon you will be able to buy the "rough cut", which is basically a draft form of the book. A sample chapter is available at the book's official site here: http://www.netbeans.org/books/rcp.html

My subject should be very simple, for it is only the difference between the orientations of computing science at two sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

James Gosling visits some Java shops: "...There are so many ways that Java apps touch peoples lives every day. And they aren't even aware of it. The web is just the tip of the iceberg."

Nvidia released the beta version of its Complete Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) software development kit today, and the folks at Beyond3D have put together a couple of articles on the architecture for the occasion. One of the articles briefly sums up what actually CUDA is, while the other goes into more detail about how CUDA works and how it's implemented