Tech Life of Recht

This week, we had the first Hacker Days with Trifork. It’s a pretty simple concept: Pack up your laptop and other necessities and head out to a more or less remote location and work on whatever little project you want. Basically, it’s a way to get some time to look at new and upcoming technologies and stuff that you can’t normally fit into your daily work.
I spent the two days with four others trying to implement a Scrum board in JavaFX. Of course, that’s not enough for two days, so we threw some Groovy into the mix too. Also, we used NetBeans for the IDE (because of the support for JavaFX), and finally we tried out Git for version control.
No complete product was created (but I don’t think anybody expected that to happen either), but here are some lessons learned:

• The declarative style of JavaFX seems promising, and the bind mechanism makes a lot of things much easier. However, it can be a little hard to think the JavaFX way – I normally think in Swing terms, and that doesn’t always work out.
• Effects in JavaFX are pretty nice. Implementing simple animations on widgets is also easy.
• When you’ve finally worked out how JavaFX works, it’s pretty easy to add new functionality, as long as you stay within bounds. There is a lot of undocumented constructs, and guessing how they work is not easy. Also, googling for JavaFX will give you a lot of articles about earlier versions, which can’t be used for anything anymore.
• For some reason, there are two worlds in JavaFX: The “native” components and the ones built on Swing. These have different properties, and are not really compatible. I’ve not figured out why yet, but it is a little irritating
• NetBeans might be a good IDE, but the JavaFX support just plainly sucks. Auto completion only works half the time, it displays errors when the compiler runs with no errors, the component palette is a joke, formatting stinks, no automatic imports. It might be better just to use Emacs or something like that because then at least you know what you’ve got, and you don’t try the auto completer again and again, hoping that it will learn something.
• Git looks promising, but for a project which needs to sync up all the time, it feels more complicated than Subversion. Especially the push and pull process is somewhat convoluted, and I’ve yet to figure out how to see what’s actually being pushed and pulled.
• Rumor has it that Git is a pain on Windows. I run Linux, so I wouldn’t know – I used something like 10 minutes to set it up, including an account at repo.or.cz.
• Finally, we had Groovy for the data layer. I didn’t work on that part, but I did hear some grumbling, primarily because of the loose typing.

We did get a semi-working application up and running, but not with real data, and only display of data, no input mechanism. However, the focus wasn’t so much on getting a complete system as it was on experimenting with new technology, and I’ve definitely learned a lot about JavaFX. The primary lesson is probably that it’s not production ready yet, and that good IDE support is vital (no surprise there).
Hopefully, the hacker days will become a semi-annual event, so maybe one day, we will have a more complete product.