Press Release
January 20, 2005
"QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook": The Java Developer's Guide to Mastering QTJ
Sebastopol, CA--Java has been a huge success in many fields--distributed
enterprise applications, mobile phones, web applications--but, according
to Chris Adamson, author of QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook
(O'Reilly, $29.95), one field in which Java has clearly flopped is media.
From the first sound API, javax.sound, through the various releases of
Java Media Framework (JMF), developers have been regularly disappointed in
attempts to support media programming in Java. Enter Apple's QuickTime, or
more specifically, QuickTime for Java. QTJ is a powerful multimedia
toolkit adding audio, video, or interaction playback and creation to
applications. But, one shortcoming of QTJ is that getting started with it
can be challenging. In terms of class-count, it's nearly as large as Java
1.1, and the included JavaDocs are somewhat lacking.
As Adamson recounts, "I've been doing media programming for awhile in Java
and got tired of the limits of Sun's Java Media Framework...beautiful API,
but won't play anything anybody actually uses. So I moved over to
QuickTime for Java. There's much more you can do with QTJ, but its problem
is poor documentation. Or, more accurately, an approach to documentation.
It's mostly references to C-language QuickTime documentation. Apparently
the authors saw their target audience as QuickTime developers moving over
to Java, so the documentation assumes a familiarity with QuickTime and
just says '...and here's how you do it in Java.'
"Which is totally backwards, of course," Adamson continues, "Because the
audience is not QuickTime developers new to Java, but Java developers new
to QuickTime. So these are the people who need a book--one that explains
all this QuickTime stuff that you're 'just supposed to know,' but
wouldn't if you hadn't already been doing it in C for a few years."
Applying the "all lab, no lecture" approach that puts developers straight
to work with a new technology, QuickTime for Java: A Developer's
Notebook shows how to install QTJ and start building applications with
it. The book is filled with useful, real-world tasks for both Mac and
Windows that demonstrate how to:
Play back audio and video
Build editors (with unlimited undo and redo support)
Discover new QuickTime capabilities at runtime
Save to different formats like MPED-4 and AVI
Capture audio and video to disk
Build movies out of raw samples
Get artist, song, and album information from MP3s and iTunes Music
Store Files
Overlay multiple video tracks
Build video effects, and more
QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook is organized into chapters of
related material, with each chapter broken down into tasks, most of which
can be understood fairly independently. "I can see different readers
focusing on completely different sections and not needing others," notes
Adamson. "Someone building an enterprise content management and
distributed video editing system will probably zero in on the material on
editing, reference movies, and converting between formats, while someone
building an MP3 jukebox will be delighted to find code to rip the
artist/song/album info out of MP3s and iTunes Music Store files."
Whatever their purpose, developers will find this informal, code-intensive
workbook gives them just the functionality they need from QuickTime for
Java.
Additional Resources:
QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook
By Chris Adamson
ISBN: 0-596-00822-8, 233 pages, $29.95 US, $43.95 CA
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938; 1-707-827-7000
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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