Tom Ball
Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Previously, Tom spent two years as part of the NetBeans team, integrating Java modeling technology researched while at Sun Laboratories. He also served as the Tools Architect for Sun's iPlanet division, and spent seven years as a key member of JavaSoft's core, AWT and Swing teams. He designed the first Java debugger API, rewrote the Windows AWT for JDK 1.1, and helped design Swing and the 1.1 AWT event model.
-Nandini
Tom has over twenty-five years industry experience; eighteen years experience with object-oriented languages and tools, the last twelve focused primarily on Java (starting when it was still called Oak).
Presentations
JavaFX: Evolution of the Java Client
The talk will provide an introduction to GUI development with JavaFX Script, a new object-oriented, declarative programming language for the Java Platform. JavaFX Script is a statically-typed language, with compile-time error reporting and has type inference, declarative syntax, and automatic data binding with full support for 2-D graphics and standard Swing components as well as declarative animation. You can also import Java classes, create new Java objects, call their methods, and implement Java interfaces. IDE plug-ins are available for both the NetBeans IDE and Eclipse. Both plug-ins support as-you-type validation, code completion, syntax highlighting, and hyperlink navigation (with Control-mouseover).
JavaFX Script attempts to demonstrate that we're not exploiting the full capabilities of the Java platform for GUI development and that, together with supporting tools such as JavaFX, the Java platform is highly competitive with or superior to competing GUI development platforms such as Adobe Apollo, Ajax/DHMTL Macromedia Flash/Flex/Open Laszlo, Microsoft WPF/XAML, and Mozilla XUL.
