This is my comment to Bruce Eckel's post Does Anyone Really Care About Desktop Java?. I really enjoyed the honesty in the comments and recommend that people read them.

Swing is difficult because it tries to solve difficult problems. Flex is much more specialized and supports a small subset of Swing's features. If you think Flex competes with Swing you probably also think that “web operating systems” done in Javascript and HTML competes with Windows and OS X. Yes, you can replace a Swing application with a Flex application if the application fits within the feature specification of Flash, but Swing is more similar to QT than Flex.

Continue reading "AMF.. huh?" »

Posted by JP at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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

network.js
network_plugins.js

Continue reading "Writing Teppefall applications in Javascript" »

Posted by JP at 07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Memory usage ! I get all teary eyed when I see this. Tamarin seems to be just as greedy as Hotspot.
Well.. at least in this totally non-scientific test. It is beta after all... dude.

Posted by JP at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "JSlider is stupid" »

Posted by JP at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "SystemTray and Swing" »

Posted by JP at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sun's Technical Articles and Tips . Tons of Java goodness.

Posted by JP at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This blog post by Chris Adamson is a good read. Even got a line or two about Java FX in it.

This guy has been doing a lot (well, more than you) of Quicktime code and understand the boring problems. My addition to his words is that any new audio/video support is not really that helpfull without a new media Applet system or first class Web Start support. The current Applet loader just crashes Firefox over and over again. They have to rethink the class loading system and cut down the number of file reads on the disk. Starting an Applet today is like starting Photoshop.

Web Start is looking better and better, but is still a bitch to debug and still slightly retarded when in sandbox mode.

Posted by JP at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by JP at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Code is unreadable

Verification code:

Posted by JP at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There has been a lot of broo-ha about Sun's new Java FX platform. Personally I see Java FX as an attempt to move forward on the mobile platform and to replace Java ME with a more powerful Java SE stack, but a lot of people see this as a Flash/Flex/WPF competitor and therefore po-po it as such. Maybe the people at Sun didn't get or read the memo. Or maybe the memo raised an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException when reading it backwards. Who knows.

Continue reading "Java FX" »

Posted by JP at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)