sebastian wagner personal blog

I recently receive newsletters of German companies that make advertising on how easy it is to patent your design. In German it is called “Geschmacksmustereintrag”

https://www.google.de/search?q=Geschmacksmustereintrag&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a

Their special clue:

For a monthly fee you get an “All-In-One” package, protecting your design. You receive a whole umbrella of tools to sue others that might or might not violate the design patent, just needs to pay xx Euro per month to those companies.
And of course you can get a bulk discount if you order multiple design patents at once.

Its seems just like a trendy new way of making money: Explain people that they need to patent everything.

I also wonder that there is not a single of those articles that do explain what a design patent really is and for what it is good for.
I am still waiting for the “Drive-Through-Patent-Station” where you get some nice stickers and T-Shirts together with a confirmation of your patent idea

With all the props that go to the upcoming release of JavaFX 2.x I tried to find out the status of the media components in JavaFX.
Looking at other platforms first:
- Flash: Camera / Microphone: See http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/media/package-detail.html really extended support, at least Adobe claims they support it on all devices (although of course there might be always slight glitches if you use some exotic webcam on Linux). They pretty much can support any DESKTOP device. And that is what makes you wonder: What about mobile platform? They just cancelled further development of Flash Mobile ( see: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html ).
- Silverlight: Camera / Microphone access was introduced in Silverlight 4, however I honestly can’t say how widespreaded the support on devices accross platforms is, as I hardly know any application that use Silverlight on Mac or even Linux to capture Cam/Mic. However there are noticeable offerings of VOD providers (Maxdome in Germany for example) that use the Silverlight platform as it seems to have a good integration of DRM tools ( see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc838192%28v=vs.95%29.aspx ). However the programming model is still shaped for .NET and Microsoft simply can’t expect that every Web-Programmer now becomes a .NET programmer.
- HTML5: There is the Video component in HTML5, and its the only cross-platform video-playback that works on mobile devices as well as on desktop (although the playback lacks on many features) . However the access to camera and microphone is in very early stages and it is not clear at all if one day browser vendors will agree on a codec for the transmission of the captured data from the device.

Now looking at JavaFX:
They build some playback components to playback video. Additionally the JavaFX API ( http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2.0/api/index.html ) has a Camera object, however it seems to have nothing to do with a “webcam”, it is an internal object used to render the UI. There is also no Microphone access. The plan seems to be like leaving this as opportunity to the users to program their own drivers to access the cam/mic. By looking at the way JMF was not developed since almost 10 years and all the negative feedback (or even “ANTI” (or counter-revolutionary) projects like FMJ ( http://fmj-sf.net/ ) I doubt that this is an opportunity lot of people will consider.

Btw: You can also participate in the discussion in the Jira issue on JavaFX bugtracker: http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-3458 Vote for it!

I published a first version and documentation for creating base lzx.xsd + project.xsd files, published here:

http://code.google.com/p/openlaszlo-schemagenerator/

Demo Video:

The JAR contains tasks to generate a XSD from your project LZX files, by doing that:

• You have full Schema Validation in Eclipse and it will show you all your XML schema errors
• The validation is aware of ALL tags and attributes: The LZX base-components(+incubator) and your project specific code
• You get content-sensitive drop down menus for Tags and Attributes
• The XSD Schema also contains type-restriction, defaultvalues and documentation for Tags and Attributes parsed from your source files
• there is a task to trim the schema from your files again as the OpenLaszlo compiler does not accept schema and prefixes (yet )

… actually what needs to be done now is to wrap my library in an Eclipse Project so that the steps that I currently do using ANT are automatically done by the IDE.

There is also a hook in the JAR-library to transfer an existing “Non-XSD-aware” project into a XSD aware project. I will publish something about that soon.

Based on the XSD you could also generate Java files with JAXB, for example you can create a whole Java representative of the LFC and your project … or you could potentially create some data-services that automatically generate LZX from Java and vice verca…