This week I'm in beautiful Crested Butte Colorado for the JavaPosse Roundup 2009 and so far I'm having a great time. This is the un/open space conference put together by the JavaPosse podcast guys. The point of an open space conference is that there's no specific agenda so everybody just suggests topics and attends whatever session they want. Today is the first real day of the conference and so far both sessions I've been to have been great.

My co-worker Ryan and I got here Sunday night and ended up at the house the Posse guys rented. We all went out to dinner and had a great time. Monday was the Day Zero of the conference where we all gathered at the Posse house and did various coding dojos. I did the JavaFX dojo. We started out the day going through the language and some of the sample projects since only one of us, Tor from the JavaPosse, had any experience with JavaFX. Sometime around lunch we decided to build something real in JavaFX and started working on a countdown timer for use later in the conference lightning talks. We built a timer that counted down and at zero played a rude sound and told the speaker to shut up. Joe from the Posse took on the role of a designer and made some really cool images to make the application look like a real clock. At the last minute we got the images mostly integrated into the application and all that remains is applying some effects we only prototyped. All in all I was very impressed with JavaFX and hope to build some real stuff with it one of these days. I’m planning on working on some visualizations that I would have done in Processing before but look much easier in JavaFX.

More on the Roundup later!