On November 6th, I visited JFall Netherlands: over 1000 Java professionals, a great venue, interesting talks, and friendly people. Great atmosphere. I’m grateful, as I met several new Java enthusiasts, including Frank Delporte, host of the Foojay.io podcast.
Although Frank didn’t know me, I knew him already quite well: I frequently listen to the Foojay podcast while running or lifting weights. So, when I saw him hosting the Foojay booth, I decided to go for a “Frank IRL experience” 🙂 It was fun and a pleasure to meet him. He invited me to participate in the Foojay podcast—the very same podcast I’ve been listening to for quite some time now. A bit anxious, I decided to go for it. So, perhaps you’ll see or hear me “starring” in the Foojay.io podcast shortly.
Frank also hosted a talk: “The wait is over: Foreign Function & Memory API (FFM API) brings modern Java to the Raspberry Pi“. It was a wonderful session, where he demoed the use of the FFM API with Pi4J. With contagious enthusiasm, he showed how he could use Java’s FFM API to instruct his Raspberry (actually a CrowPi) to do several things, ranging from the electronics version of the classic ‘Hello world’, that is to say, blinking a LED, to blinking Morse code or performing real-time distance measurements.
It made me enthusiastic to dive deeper into the FFM API as well—not only to play around with my Raspberry Pi, which has been idle for some time now, but also to explore whether the FFM API could be useful in integrating with one of the well-known financial libraries written in C: QuantLib. Who knows, perhaps that could be an interesting angle to pursue. More on that later; first, we have a job to finish: a test bank in JavaFX.
Since my last post, time has flown, and the JavaFX-based test bank is still not where I want it to be. Learning new things is always a hard, and I found the following particularly challenging:
- distribution (macOS/Windows/Linux)
- event handling (JavaFX events and application-level events)
- in-app navigation
Perhaps I’ll address these in a separate blog post at a later stage. For now, you can follow my progress by downloading one of the work-in-progress versions. They are far from “ready”, but as one modern software maxim goes: if you’re not at least somewhat embarrassed by what you ship, then you’ve shipped too late 😉
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