News from the Software Smithy

SoftSmithy news: I recently released a new version of the SoftSmithy Utility Library and the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library.

In addition to the library updates, a lot of migration work has been done:

• Project migration: Ant -> Maven
  
• Project migration: Subversion -> Mercurial
  
• License upgraded: SPL -> CDDL
  
• Project versioning aligned with Maven versioning, starting with v0.1
• Project layout restructured

For easier version management I aligned the version of the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library with the version of the SoftSmithy Utility Library. As the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library has a dependency to the SoftSmithy Utility Library it's recommended to use the same version of both libraries until the APIs are stable!

I added new utility methods, classes and framework updates for locale-sensitive sorting, object matching, Swing JTable row headers, streams, lists, unit tests and more.

You can download the archives (including the jars, documentation, samples etc.) and read more about the changes here:
SoftSmithy Utility Library v0.1 (online documenation)
SoftSmithy Development Utility Library v0.1 (online documentation)

Since the project is now built with Maven, I deployed the artifacts (including source and javadoc artifacts) to Maven Central. You can use the following dependencies:

For the SoftSmithy Utility Library:
<br /> <dependency><br /> <groupid>org.softsmithy.lib</groupid><br /> <artifactid>lib-core</artifactid><br /> <version>0.1</version><br /> </dependency><br />

For the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library (usually with scope = test):
<br /> <dependency><br /> <groupid>org.softsmithy.devlib</groupid><br /> <artifactid>devlib-core</artifactid><br /> <version>0.1</version><br /> <scope>test</scope><br /> </dependency><br />

DON'T PANIC!

Today is a very special day! To begin with, today is also a very binary day: 10.10.10
But as it happens, 101010 is the binary representation of the decimal value - right: 42! Also widely known as the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything! So whether today someone finally knows how the world could be made a good and happy place or whether the earth has to make way for a hyperspatial express route or whatever happens today: Always know where your towel is and DON'T PANIC!

News from the Software Smithy

I recently released a new version of the SoftSmithy Utility Library. I added new utility methods and classes for locale-sensitive sorting, JPA and more. Have a look at the changelog at the end of the README file and at the Javadoc for more details.

Alongside the SoftSmithy Utility Library (lib) I recently published the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library (devlib). The difference between these two libraries is the SoftSmithy Utility Library (lib) contains classes, which you usually want to deploy with your program, while the SoftSmithy Development Utility Library (devlib) contains classes, which are useful at development and deployment time etc., but you usually won't want them on the classpath of your program. Currently it's quite small. I just added a few utility classes for database population with JPA and for unit testing which are still subject to change while I keep looking for best practices. Have a look at the Javadoc for more details.

YANPA: Remote EJB Monitoring Application on the NetBeans Platform

Geertjan Wielenga, an Oracle/ Sun employee and a technical writer of the NetBeans team, blogged in his YANPA (Yet Another NetBeans Platform Application) series about a pilot project of one of my customers where I could introduced the NetBeans Platform. You can read more about it here.

News - Swing-Generics (OpenJDK): JList patch commited

Great news from the OpenJDK swing-generics project: my patch to "generify" JList, along with AbstractListModel, DefaultListCellRenderer, DefaultListModel, ListCellRenderer and ListModel, has been commited to the OpenJDK/ Swing repository!

This patch helps writing more stable code.

Eg. instead of writing something like:
<br />DefaultListModel model = new DefaultListModel();<br />model.addElement("test");<br />JList list = new JList(model);<br />...<br />String value = (String) list.getSelectedValue(); // unchecked cast<br />Foo foo = (Foo) list.getSelectedValue(); // cast will fail at runtime<br />

with this patch you can write now:
<br />DefaultListModel<String> model = new DefaultListModel<String>();<br />model.addElement("test");<br />JList<String> list = new JList<String>(model);<br />...<br />String value = list.getSelectedValue();<br />Foo foo = list.getSelectedValue(); // compile time error<br />

Note that:
JList.getSelectedValues(): Object[]
has been deprecated and replaced with:
JList.getSelectedValuesList(): List<E>

Have a look at the jtreg tests to see more examples.

If you're interested in the future of Swing, join the discussions in the OpenJDK Swing mailing list.

NetBeans Platform: JNLP & static codebase

Recently the question was asked on the dev@openide.netbeans.org mailing list, how to deploy a JNLP NetBeans Platform application to a web server, which doesn't support WAR-files.
I had the same problem when I wanted to deploy the sample application of my last NetBeans Platform post (NetBeans Platform meets Swing Application Framework: SessionStorage), which is a JNLP NetBeans Platform application, too, that I host along with its source at sourceforge.net.

Here are the build.xml and platform.properties I used:

• build.xml
• platform.properties

The Ant script will create the file "${nbdist.dir}/${app.name}-updated.war". Just copy it to your web server and unzip it there. Then link to the master.jnlp to provide a starting-point to your application, eg. by creating a web start launch button.


Here is the complete code:
http://puces-samples.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/puces-samples/tags/sessionstate-1.0/

You can run this sample here:
http://puces-samples.sourceforge.net/
or here:
http://puces-blog.blogspot.com/2009/04/netbeans-platform-meets-swing.html
(at the bottom of the page)

Technorama: The Magic of Software

Last Friday I visited the special exhibition "The Magic of Software" at the Technorama Winterthur, Switzerland. It's an event to the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Switzerland. Since Noser Engineering AG (the company I work for) is Microsoft Gold Partner, we got the chance to provide an application to this exhibition, of which I helped to implement a small part.

We implemented a multi-touch truck disposition game. The user has to try to distribute a list of orders to a fixed number of trucks. The more order you can deliver in the given time the more points you get.

At this technological excursion I got the chance to work with some of the newest Microsoft technologies:

• .NET 4.0 Beta (WPF, C#, XAML)
• Windows 7 (RC)
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 (Beta)
  

The software runs on a HP TouchSmart.

Here are some pictures of the application at the exhibition (I took them with my cell phone, the quality isn't optimal):






The exhibition is open until the 31th October, 2009. Try to beat my result! As you can see on the second picture, that shouldn't be hard. ;-) (rank: 111; points: 42'605)