Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I will be buying a new phone soon (the old employer's BlackBerry is going away) and have been looking at getting an iPhone. I am a notorious hardware holdout, rather than an edge cutter (I like the 2 gens ago chips, they are fast *and* cheap - still typing this on a MacBook core duo I got a few years back, still works fine). That, combined with the fact that the company decided for me in the past, is the reason I don't have an iPhone already.

As an aside, the reason I noticed this is that Cooper twittered it (I am one of those Dvorak style Twitter curmudgeon holdouts, but I do see the tweets from time to time on Facebook ;)).

It took us a lot longer than we anticipated, and the timing is not great (with GWT 1.5 just around the corner), but GWT in Practice is finally done-done, and it is with the printer. Should be available in paperback, as an actual book (rather than just eBook form, which it has been available as for some time) any day now.

Woot and stuff - we did it, Cooper and I wrote a book.

Fortunately even with GWT 1.5 imminent I think this book will still stand on it's own - it addresses a lot of concepts and patterns that go beyond the syntax of any particular version of GWT, so it will still be valuable even to those using 1.5.

Anyway, the real reason for this post is that a friend noticed something funny on the Amazon page, those who bought this book also bought . . . . wait for it . . . Blade Runner. ;)

Recently I had a need to be able to work with EXIF image metadata in JPEG files from Java. First, some background, then, some code.

Sample image I used, lots of EXIF info on this shot of a 1971 SL70 that I am rebuilding.

I started by looking at JAI-imageio, which is the current home of the old Sun JAI project (to be fair, that and more), but I couldn't readily figure out how to use it to write EXIF data. The capability might be there, but I couldn't find any substantive documentation or examples (apart from JavaDocs, which are useful yes, but I needed more hand holding to start out). When I ran into this basic getting started stumbling block I broadened my search.

From there I found several third party libraries. Most notable where Metadata Extractor, and Sanselan.

http://www.ongwt.com/post/2008/03/31/GWT-submitted-as-JSR-404

Awesome news, Sun wakes up, GWT is now going to be in the JSR fold, with James Gosling as one of the tech leads! Not only that, but check out the rest of the list of contributors (yours truly, Prabhakar, Cooper, Reinier, and more).

[Please pay no attention to the date of the story, or to the fact that I put this post in the "humour" category ;).]

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

Completely cool, take the survey and see if you might be a suitable candidate (and please disregard the current date as you do it).

Charts for your GWT apps, viola - here's what you need to know:

Pie, line, and area charts on the CLIENT via GWT

It's pure Java - not JSNI

The API is pretty simple, first glance a lot like JFreeChart

It cleverly uses Grids and Images on AbsolutePanels (so line charts end up with dots, and pie charts end up banded - but still convey the meaning just fine

It's open source and priced right (free)

GChart site at gcode