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Friday, April 29, 2005

Wonderful JApplet

I'm going to take the chance to just muse a bit, as it is a blog, so I guess I should put up some thoughts. Oh, I'm working on a 2.0b release of Class Viewer, but still haven't got the hang of the GUI design fixes yet, as I'm still working on it, and learning how you do it in Swing, which, unfortunately, doesn't seem intuitive to me.

Until I get that down I can't have the Class Viewer use the Look-and-Feel functionality, which I guess it'd be good to have, so I'm working on it...

Ok, about JApplets, and why I put wonderful in the title, well, notice that Class Viewer is a JApplet, but it's really an application meant for the desktop, so why make it a JApplet as well?

Well, the functionality of Class Viewer works great over the web as well--though I've got work to do in that area--and you can do most of its functionality over the web, so it makes sense to have it web capable, and that means I can just put it on a webpage.

For those who want the full functionality, you can just download it and run it as an application on your machine, and it's all good.

It seems to me that where there's a possibility of web functionality, applications should be applets, or have an applet portion, like, if it's a huge app, so that you can demonstrate some functionality over the web.


James

Friday, April 15, 2005

Getting back to Swing

One of the areas where I've yet to really update Class Viewer is with the GUI, and I guess it's time to do so, which means I need to get up to speed with Swing and the latest there.

After that it'll be time for another release which I guess I'll call 2.0b, while on the back burner is a future major release that I've code named Phoenix.

It's time to get back to Swing. And notice I resisted the urge to pun.


James Harris

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Some history

Studying for the Java Certification exam I was writing programs as I studied, and while learning about Reflections I wrote a short program I called ClassInfo.java, and I worked with it a while as I thought it was neat to be able to look up class information.

Eventually I got to the GUI sections and thought it'd be a good idea to put a viewer so I wrote ClassViewer.java, and wrote it as a JApplet with main functionality, which I think is just a good way to write applications, as then you can have them capable of acting as applets.

Well I did pass my Java Certification Programmer and went on to other work, but found that I was using my Class Viewer program regularly, and even tried to talk it up to other programmers who were just not that interested. I don't know how that works, but I think it's typical that when you get an idea, it's not so easy to just show it to people you work with, and expect them to adopt it. Or maybe that's just with me.

I tried to figure out various ways to get it out there, and tried talking to some people, but nothing happened. And I just kind of went on to other things.

Well over a year passed when I ended up in a discussion with someone talking about SourceForge, and nope, I hadn't heard of them before then, but this person had presented a project to them. Well it didn't take long before I figured I should check, so I checked and figured that it was just what I needed. So I immediately presented my Class Viewer program and it was accepted.

And that's how I ended up with my own open source project on SourceForge.

More later on what it's like plus some thoughts on what I see as the market for a class viewing program, plus some ideas for the future.


James Harris

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Getting started

Well I decided I needed to create a blog to cover my open source project, but also I'd like to be able to talk about other work of mine, so I title this "Java and Beyond" so that I could.

Right now I'm just creating the blog while I work on a new release, so the program can link back to the blog.

Later I plan on adding more.

Well, I finished most of the coding and uploaded the files to SourceForge. I need to update the project web pages, but I'm kind of tired.

Maybe later.


James Harris