With the “Filthy Rich Clients” book just around the corner, the co-author Romain Guy was gracious enough to answer a few questions that i had about the book and the related topics.

Whose idea was it to write the book?

Chet came up with the idea. Chet loves to write and his wordy, yet, rare, blog entries are a good giveaway. That Chet wanted to write a book seemed quite natural to me. Because I also really enjoy writing, I translated a few books for O’Reilly and wrote a couple hundreds articles for technical magazines, Chet offered me to co-author the book. Besides, our skills are very complementary. Chet takes care of the technical groundwork and the jokes while I handle high-level effects and visual stuff. He knows how to write code, I know how to use Photoshop.

How much time did you spend on writing your part?

It’s hard to come up with a precise answer. My writing spanned over about 4 months, during which I was quite busy with school and exams. I spent long periods without writing anything and did most of the work in short but intensive bursts. That’s how I always worked but it drove Chet insane. He was quite worried at times but we delivered in time.

Did you use any special collaboration tools on those chapters that you wrote together?

Unfortunately, no. I have used Subversion and CVS in the past for that kind of work, but we relied entirely on Word’s tracking system, IM (a lot) and email (gazillions of emails were exchanged.) We did not bother much with collaboration tools because we worked separately on chapters. Only chapters 2 and 5 contain text that we both wrote. However, I was worried about losing work when trying to merge the files we exchanged by email. Actually we made a mistake once and almost lost a bit of work; good thing I have two daily external backups. And I know that for our next book we will use plain text and Subversion.

How did you decide on what goes in the book and what stays out?

That’s quite easy. Everything went into the book, nothing stayed out. As I said earlier, Chet and I are quite experienced writers. Besides, we thought hard about the content before starting writing the first pages and it was very clear to use what the final content would be. We did shuffled chapters around but we didn’t have to suffer from any cut or large addition.

How did you handle the inherent restrictions of the printed format for such a dynamic area as animations?

One of our recurrent jokes was to print an animation’s frames in the corner of the pages and use the book as a flip-book. From the beginning we knew that the book would have a companion site with all of the source code. We also simply decomposed a few animations as a series of screenshots or diagrams in the book. While it doesn’t look as good as the real animation, it does an excellent job at showing precisely what happens on screen.

Do you see value in writing books in the blog era?

I definitely do. Even though I spend a lot of time every day reading blogs and online articles, I always find it tedious to read on a screen. Blogs also tend to focus too much on details or, on the contrary, do not delve enough into the details. This is very valuable but a book is always, to me, a better asset when I need to learn about a technology or a topic I know nothing about.

I know that glass panes were your favorite technique once. Has this changed?

I would say that my favorite technique was and still is @Override protected void paintComponent().

What are your top three wishes for the desktop APIs for the next JDK release?

I am pretty happy with the APIs as they stand now. That said, I’d love to see non-rectangular windows, lightweight/heavyweight integration (which would bring video, 3D and 2D together) and something like SwingX‘s painters.

What are the top three desktop APIs that you wish never existed in the JDK?

One is obvious, AWT. Just because I’m tired of explaining on forums that you should not use Canvas and Button but JComponent and JButton. And it has nothing to do with Java, but I have a profound dislike for Tk and wxWidgets APIs.

What other non-Java desktop toolkits do you use? What can Swing learn from them?

I used Tk, wxWidgets and QT quite a lot in the past. I am particularly fond of QT, even though it’s far from perfect. Nowadays, I also enjoy working with Cocoa. The interesting thing about those toolkits is very often the ease of use. Their architecture is not always very pretty but you can get things done with them very quickly and they are easier to apprehend. I don’t think Swing could learn anything from them since it’s too different and too complex now. However, Sun could learn from them for a possible new toolkit; it’s all about ease of use and making common use cases easy to implement. Desktop Java developers could learn from those toolkits. For instance, I am fond of Cocoa developer’s use of images. Instead of tinkering with drawing APIs for hours to create a nice looking widget, they just stitch a few images together. It’s simple and efficient.

Would you take this book with you to a deserted island?

No, I’ve read it so many times that I know it by heart now.

Would you take Chet with you to a deserted island?

Only if I can also bring a typewriter to keep him busy and prevent him from telling me his jokes.

Do you actually like Chet’s jokes?

I actually do like them a lot!