This is the first "cloud based" product from Teppefall. More information will come over the next couple of months. It runs on Google AppEngine and is standard J2EE plus a few Google extensions. JavaMail, Twitter4J and XMPP works great.
Alpha product. Even the website is alpha. Teppefall HybridKit coming soon to a device near you.
Supporting 64bit is not very important when most of your code is in Java. But Teppefall does have around 300kb of C++ that needs to be ported. And the process is something like this.
The volume component gives it away. But Silverlight 4 may change that.
Hybrid is a component API for developing Swing applications. Instead of writing Java code from the start, you simply write a layout file and an application manifest file. Both are XML files. You then export the user interface assembly in Teppefall Layout and start adding Java or Javascript code. The application manifest format is almost identical to Adobe AIR application.xml files.
You only need Java skills if you want to deploy in a web browser. Compiling Javascript is possible, but dependency problems might bite you in the ass later on. Rhino changed their threading model once and that really confused the heck out of me.
Teppefall SDK 20091019 (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris)
This is a demo of how sockets work under a security policy. You can create a (text) Relay server and then start another instance and connect as a client.
PS
If your comment is not showing up..well.. it is because I now have over 14 000 unread email messages.
All software except the SDK has been updated. Tons of minor fixes and the compile target is now 1.5. Yeah, yeah, I know. I needed to support OS X Panther.
Also releasing some new software. VmPrefetch is a simple VM prefetcher that should be run on startup. Nothing fancy yet, but I'm reading up on the latest instrumentation API's, so it might get smarter in the future. Currently this has a high snake oil factor, but I'm too arrogant to care. This is still not a 1.0, so user beware.
Create a shortcut and move it into one of these folders. Or just run it from the desktop.
Windows Vista
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
Windows XP
C:\Documents And Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
OS X
Right click on icon and select “Open at Login”.
LCDTest is an updated version of the demo application that is included in the SDK. Very few people will find this too exciting.
It was never my intention to write Teppefall applications in Javascript, but here is a simple example on how to do it. The update system, the DSR (Teppefall Runtime) launcher and some Application logic is not available at this time because of dependency problems. It is hard to use Javascript when the concept of a Class is replaced with something else. And working with all kinds of adapter logic is also pretty confusing.
If you want to run this example, just move the /network_app folder into the Teppefall SDK root folder and run Network.cmd or NetworkOSX.sh. This demo showcases plugins, the taskbar icon, layout and basic setup.
You have to download Teppefall Layout to get the original layout file used in this example.
Teppefall SDK Javascript example: network_app.zip
Continue reading "Writing Teppefall applications in Javascript" »
Here are the changes.
Teppefall Layout 3.6
Teppefall FX 3.6
Teppefall Colorspace 1.9
Teppefall SDK (Darkstar) 20080303
Continue reading "FX, Layout, Colorspace and the SDK has been updated" »
There is a lot of tricky logic in this application that is not so obvious just by looking at some screen shots. There are the delicious differences between Windows XP and Vista on how they deal with shared native libraries. There are minimum two gotchas. One, if you link against stuff like Visual C++ or MingW32 G++ you must add the C++ library to your application base path on Vista. It will not work the way it does on XP, where the DLL can just be on the system path. Second, any custom JNI library must be added to the system path before a VM is created. Just setting java.library.path will not work on Vista -if- the path is not the base path (“.”).
Continue reading "Teppefall Capture – From prototype to application" »
Colorspace updates:
- Support for two monitors !! (thanks to Quaqua/Werner Randelshofer)
- CMD and SH files have the correct Darkstar parameters.
- Added a button that displays the pop-up menu.
Teppefall SDK (Darkstar) updates:
- EXE parameter -Xgraphite. The Graphite look and feel is faster than Titanium LAF.
- Linux executables.
- Linux shell script updates.
- Windows command script cleanup.
- Executables now treat all applications the same way.
- Substance 4 - Non-active menu color corrected.
- Substance 4 - Disabled menu item color corrected.
- Substance 4 - Color field no longer have dots in it under a dark LAF theme.
- DSR supports the new EXE files. You can now use -Xgraphite and -Xchrome on the DSR executable.
Continue reading "Colorspace 1.7, FX/Layout 3.4, SDK 20071105" »
I have been playing a little with Kirill's SVG to Java transcoder and then manually converting the Java code into Javascript based Darkstar FX renderer's. Very tedious, but good fun nevertheless. I had less success with the SVG to JavaFX converter, but that might just be a case of me using old software.
There are at least four SVG importer pipelines available for Java, so there seems to be some interest in this.
New features:
This is a library update with some compatibility fixes.
Continue reading "Colorspace 1.6, Layout 3.3, FX 3.3 and Darkstar 20070930" »
The memory leak seems to affect Windows XP as well, so I can only assume that this is a problem on all platforms. You are only affected if you run under -Dteppefall.chrome=false and you can probably stop the problem by setting -Dteppefall.cursor-monitor=false.
Example:
java
-Dteppefall.cursor-monitor=false
-Dteppefall.chrome=false
-Dteppefall.override=true
-Dswing.defaultlaf=com.teppefall.ds.look.TitaniumLAF
-jar darkstarlayout.jar
There seems to be a Windows Vista specific memory leak in the latest build. Applications will stop working correctly after 24 hours or so. I am working on it.
On a side note.. My Apple Powerbook is spewing out thousands of error messages. “bootp_session_transmit: bpf_write(en2) failed: No buffer space available (55)” plus errors from launchd, Mail and various processes. Who knows what is wrong. Maybe swap is screwed up.. if I have swap that is :) Rebooting the machine every day now (how unnatural). Waiting for Leopard.
The latest ATI graphics driver hangs Windows XP and Linux KDE now complains that it can't talk to klauncher. And to top all this off. Firefox uses 95% CPU when idling in multiple Web 2.0 websites.
I might have found the cause of global warming. Software bugs.
Darkstar 2D's CompositeQuickTime.createImageFromQT should work on OS X and you end up with a apple.awt.OSXImage. Fun fact: searching for apple.awt.OSXImage on Google gives me 10 hits.
CMYK test image - 592 kb (in RGB below)
New features:
Colorspace supports the scroll wheel. One NPE fixed. Both fixes by Luan. Decimal values are written to standard output when the decimal check box is selected. 200-500ms shaved off About dialog launch. Colorspace no longer runs under a security policy since it causes to many problems on OS X.
Darkstar applications now have focus aware menus under Titanium LAF. A feature from the stone age. Just use com.teppefall.ds.Application in the same way as before. This means that the foreground color of your menu goes dark (under Titanium) when the JFrame loses focus.
The DSR executable supports the -Xchrome parameter. This turns on the native chrome and is the same as -Dteppefall.chrome=true.
DSR can launch multiple applications at the same time. Just add a comma separator between class names. A word of warning though. Running threads might block the shutdown process, so closing down resources on application exit is paramount. Note that DSR today has a very high probability of not closing down properly.
Other issues:
If Darkstar FX is unable to create HTML and thumbnails you should try the -Xinsecure parameter. FX and Layout run under security managers and can fail if the policy file is not perfect. Strange problems when running under DSR might also be a result of the security policy.
Continue reading "Colorspace 1.5, Layout 3.2, FX 3.2 and Darkstar 20070905" »
I found this excellent screenshot tool today. So I tested it out. All applications are running on Vista with the -Xchrome parameter.
Teppefall Darkstar EXE parameters for Windows.
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Titanium is is an extended version (as in "extends") of the Substance LAF. All visuals except the LAF aware Titanium icon logic is done using Substance API's. This is really a beta product, but I put it into production because I really enjoy using it. You can change back to the standard Graphite look by using the Substance LAF top left menu.
Titanium will eventually be bitmap free and use live Java 2D renderers and vector images. This image shows a JOptionPane with a LAF aware Java 2D rendered icon.
Colorspace is a mashup (that is what the kids call it nowadays) of the Substance LAF initialization code, the Xoetrope color wheel, the Quaqua color picker and Teppefall Darkstar.
I have done a lot of work in the design industry and know the work flow of designers and web developers. I thought that this application might be a snug fit for just that group. Hell, even a girly girl girl might appreciate this one. Yes, I have bitch-slapped myself for saying that. Colorspace should be a helpful tool alongside Photoshop and Dreamweaver.
Windows look and feel is activated by adding the "-native" argument to the exe file. There is a CMD script in /system that will launch your application in Windows mode. All Darkstar applications support this.
You don't have to use Java in order to create Darkstar applications. Here is a simple project I wrote in Python - py_dsi.zip.
Continue reading "Writing Darkstar applications in Python" »
Darkstar 2D, the system that powers Surface, can also be used in web applications. Here is a simple example in the form of a visual barrier. Darkstar 2D also supports rendering over Java RMI if you need to be able to read Photoshop PSD files on a Mac from a Linux server. The RMI code takes forever to initialize but is quite snappy when operational.
This example is running on a Linux box and uses -Djava.awt.headless=true since it has no GUI system installed.
Intelligent forms should make the JFC experience more inviting. Subtle hints are more user friendly than "ERROR ERROR" after move, click, move, click, move, click, click, etc. The inspiration comes from the Web 2.0 movement, but the concept is very old. Very 1999 I guess.
This is just a Photoshop mock-up by myself, but according to some trusted sources we might see this functionality very soon.
Tons of polish. Windows versions should be awesome.
Mac versions might have some problems :( Shutdown logic might be borked more than before.
I wrote a Apollo/Flex compiler this week that compiles into 100% Java. Just a toy.. it implements like 1,5 percent of Flex and has no Actionscript or SWF support.
You can transcode SWF to Java FX, Actionscript can be mapped to Java.. but that still means no video, no mp4 and no video capture support. There is no point.. People use Flash BECAUSE it supports these things.. not because it is in XML.
package com.teppefall.ds.demo;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import com.teppefall.ds.Application;
public class PaintableApp extends Application {
public PaintableApp(String args[]) {
super("Paintable", args, new Dimension(600, 600));
getApplicationFrame().getContentPane().add(new Paintable());
showApplication();
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
Application.launch(PaintableApp.class, args);
}
}
Inspired by the Adobe Apollo project and Bruce Eckel's article about Java user interfaces, I have created the Darkstar Installer or DSI for short.