I just came out from one more of the Globalcode‘s casual classes. The topic this time: Digital TV.

It usually takes me a few days before I write something about an event I attended. Well, its time to change this. But why now?

One of the speakers at the event was Dimas Oliveira. He opened the event (unofficially) asking the audience several different questions that seemed somewhat disconnected at first. But in the end he came to a conclusion that is similar to my reasoning to have this post out quickly. Timing.

Dimas Oliveira

Do we know Digital TV related buzzwords and/or its related technologies? Or at least know what they are? Do we want to? If so, the time is now. Actually, we might be a little late already. So, learn now, earn the dividends, or give up and move away to something else – later will be too late.

Makes sense? Hope so. Now, to some more concrete stuff. Dimas talked about opportunity, and remembered us that Ginga-J was just approved as an official Digital TV system (system? framework? API? I’m not sure yet about how to call it) down here in Brazil – as of a few weeks ago, actually. There is at least one TV device already available for sale, and there is certainly more to come. Good timing to get in this market for us developers.

Next, Thiago Vespa talked about BD-J – Java for Blue Ray devices. If you live in Mars, you might not know yet that Java runs on Blue Ray devices, like the Playstation 3. BD-J is the technology to use when developing applications that run on such devices. This part of the casual class was a little bit (just a little ;)) offset from the rest.

Thiago Vespa

Then Neto Marin talked about LWUIT. LWUIT is an API/Framework to develop user interfaces for mobile devices. He explained quickly how it works and followed to a demonstration, given by Thiago again. He demostrated how to develop an Xlet (a Digital TV application), using LWUIT interface. The point being: LWUIT was added as part of the Ginga-J specification, and thus can be used to develop the interface of any Digital TV application.

In time: today they decided to exchange the pizza time to the start of the event instead of the end. What was happening before was that we reached the end of the talkings being really hungry, and couldn’t pay too much attention to the last speakers. Only the beers stayed at the end this time. Good call – I can’t talk for the rest of the attendees, but I liked the change.

No promises, but I might try to play a little bit with Ginga-J. If so, I’ll post whatever results I get here. See you next time!