JavaForge Project: jPlay - a music catalog and player in Java

This blog post is the first article in a new series that we are launching today.

Starting from this week, we will introduce notable JavaForge projects and community members on a regular basis. How does it work? We will pick up an active project pretty much randomly, and will make a quick email interview with the team members. Your answers are then published in the Intland blog and in our periodic newsletters. This is a great opportunity for you to introduce your projects to a wider audience, and a great opportunity for us to learn more about how we could improve our free project hosting service. We plan to reuse this collective wisdom in our commercial products, too.

Would like to participate in it? Just tweet a message with the #javaforge hashtag to @intland, and we will get back to you right away.

The first project we would like to introduce you is jPlay, a desktop music catalog and player developed in Java.

Interviewee Profile

Name: Carlos Hoces
Bio: Electronics and Automation Engineer
Location: Spain

The jPlay Project (Website)

What is your project about?

We try to build a Java desktop application to manage a catalogue of music media, files and broadcasting streams, and be able to play them. There are many of this kind, but very few written in Java language. We are also building a set of tools, that will not only serve as a programming factory and framework for jPlay development, but also as a reusable set of packages for other projects development as well.
We think Java language is powerful enough, and unfortunately not widely used for mainstream applications. We also try to help at filling this gap with our project.

How are people using your project in real life?

The project hasn't yet been released. It's still a work in progress at this time, and is under a very active development. We plan to release an early access build very soon. It currently is able to run, is capable of managing a music catalogue, and plays music files and radio streams; but we want to retouch the GUI interface a bit, and add some features in phase of development, before going to an alpha release.

What was your biggest surprise?

This project has been source opened and hosted (in another repository) for several months by now, and this is the very first time it gets some attention, thanks to the JavaForge team. We knew desktop programming in Java doesn't seem to grab attention enough, other than for in-house development; but I didn't expect such a dense silence. Mainstream applications may use, for their background “plumbing”, the very same sophisticated technologies as any corporate in-house development does - when not even more advanced ones; but I have the feeling they are seen sort of no more than “toys”.

Your biggest challenge?

We wanted to connect the best and latest Java technologies, along with embedded SQL engines (we currently use MySQL), to a modern and nice looking user interface, easy to use and featured, but very efficient and performing in the background. Glueing all together, while keeping a modular and abstract approach was (and still is) quite challenging.

Your biggest achievement?

To get it running without watching the computer falling apart?
Joking aside, Salvatore Ciaramella, project co-administrator, made an excellent job with the SQL agnostic factory classes, which allow any programmer to work with the SQL engine, without any need of knowledge of SQL language. Let's not forget at all his great contributions to logging, monitoring, settings, GUI design and many, many ideas which help jPlay to jump-up to what's now.
It was very exciting and rewarding for myself the Swing extensions developed straight from JDK, to include several new functions and features, like embedded pop-up menus, adjustable columns in tables, the tree-table used for system files, zebra stripping, among many others, and the Drag'n'Drop.

Can you tell us about the team?

This is a team project, in the full sense of the word. We're currently just two people, Salvatore and me; but I must say we can make “noise” as if we were a dozen or so, minimum
Objectives, ideas, goals, challenges, achievements... everything is shared!

How do you coordinate the project and communicate with members?

Respecting the base structure of the project, any idea is shared, openly discussed, and if it seems valuable and feasible, it's assigned and put on test. Once it's ready to get incorporated to the project itself, everyone collaborates to make it running, enhance it, clear bugs, etc.
The usual communication method is by using the forums, and mailing lists.
In order to get an idea about our working style, I would suggest a reading of our forums.

Your future directions?

We see jPlay as a starting point, sort of a basement for a multimedia set of applications, frameworks and tools, both server based and client side, which may bring the true power of Java language out of its current confinement into “tools, servers and in-house”, to a wide spread of mainstream users. We also think this kind of development may benefit the language itself, and more dedicated and professional application developments as well.
As Salvatore use to say: “Hope we will create something I could share with other people, known and unknown.”

Are you looking for contributors? If so, how can others contribute?

We are always willing to welcome contributors. They may share ideas, code, contents, beta testing, help with translations. There is always room for anyone willing to do a serious work in this project.
To put it in Salvatore's own words: “Let me say that even if we made "something", we will of course gain a shift, 'with a little help from our friends' (to quote the Beatles) over the net . Hope many will join. Hope this will be a new dawn on JavaForge.”

Experiences with JavaForge

Why did you choose JavaForge?

We came from another well known hosting site, which is closing (or “something” like that) within next weeks. Most of our current forum entries were ported from that site to JavaForge.
There were a couple of details that helped our decision move to JavaForge: the NetBeans support via a plug-in, and the nice, comfortable, featured and so professional hosting service JavaForge offers.

Strengths of JF?

It's clear, concise, and very well featured. Setting up a project, and start working on it, takes very little effort. Moving a project from some other site up to JavaForge could be done very quickly, easily, and the end result may have a nice looking too. What else?

Weaknesses of JF?

I am very naïve at JavaForge, but I saw a potential problem with admin settings. I would prefer to have all settings in a single place: there are some inside Admin, but also inside Forums as well. This may be very confusing at first.
I miss a simple Web hosting for projects: once they are release to generally available, it could be easier to connect users to project development.

What SCM system are you using?

We do use Subversion. I think is simple, efficient, well supported. Sometimes it may go nuts; but I don't know of any absolutely fail-safe version control system.

What would you advise to someone thinking about starting a project on JavaForge?

To have a very close look at the site: it has much more to offer than it seems to at first glance.

Posted at 02:44PM Feb 09, 2010 by Intland Team in Customer Stories  |