XML & Swing... pita

http://java-source.net/open-source/xml-user-interface-toolkits

Well, going through this leads to a conlcusion : client / server with Swing & JEE is a bit like crossing the Death Vallyey wihout a bottle of water.

Java RIA... getting impressed by... Apache Pivot

More than a year ago, I wrote a few articles on Apache Pivot. Well, my enthusiasm was very limited.


We are now in the process of re-writting a Delphi based application. Ideally using Java...

We could use simply Swing. But note, that the Swing application framework went back to life before to re-die again...

We checked OpenSwing. It is a good library, which adds a lot of good things on top of Swing. Useful but the look & feel... and a lot of code for just a little app.

To ease things, I looked at Netbeans as a platform. Overkill in many cases and it solved many problem we don't have and ignore those we have... Including we need a short learning curve and  among the big issue dynamic localization - language switching http://netbeans.dzone.com/multilingual-netbeans-platform-applications.


Also I spent a bit of time reading about JavaFX. Nice little language, but I cannot find anything that looks like an enterprise feature. Again the old Sun syndrom, we found a nice idea, lets market it against inacessible competition and consider our installed based as supreme idiots... bringing them features they never asked.


So I checked again Pivot - now version 1.5 and I AM IMPRESSED.

Documentation is very much improved, so that makes the purpose very much understandable.  Plus you have a bunch of very good examples.

The graphical glitches are gone ! Performance looks pretty good.

Most of the things are there and well designed, Web services, binding, event handling, scripting in the UI definition (any JVM language...).

And yes, a good looking mechanism for static localization.

The design is clean and nice (not very fancy but it is good loooking). It is designed to be skinnable, so we can expect much more funny things sooner or later.

You can build GUI using a straightforward XML based language (the layout can then get transferred to the client and transformed into GUI -> yes in fact this what Open ERP Python APP does...) .

So it is a cool toolkit and it appears much more oriented towards enterprise apps than FX. So my new acronym Rich Enterprise Internet Application that fits for Pivot but no go for FX.

The unfortunate thing... it is not compatible with Swing (I can live with that) but I need a minimal kind of word processor for my app (that I have with Swing and EditorKit stuff). Too bad, nothing is perfect... But keep going Apache Pivot you are heading to the right direction. At least I am getting convinced!

Just a link so you can check (you need Java plugin to get the examples running): http://pivot.apache.org

James Gosling left java

As many people know, James Gosling, the father of Java left Oracle. It seems it last speaches describeb the Java Community Process as a Nightmare.

http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=59733.

I worked in standardization comitte, years ago. Technical-politics are not fun. In fact it is a general issue with getting people from different horizon to work together for the common interrest.

One remark, JEE6 really rocks and is probably much more agile than many other things. The ability to hot deploy and keep session state in Glassfish is very impressive and largely superior to anything - including the OpenERP Python module load stuff (at least on the debug cycle/ reload cycle).

Some JPA for a tiny library management app

I am part of the parents comittee of my kids school. Among our projects we are trying to setup a small library for kids.

I like helping the community but  these projects are challenging because we run on a nearly zero € budget.

So I proposed myself to manage the book catalog. I built a year ago a small Java app for printing stickers with barcode (an opportunity for doing raw printing). Now I am working on the application to mange book leases.

I took this opportunity to use JPA for building a Swing desktop application. The databasee has been designed directly with MySQL. I imported the schema and Netbeans (6.8) generated the persistene unit and the Java classes. Good but the generation was a bit disappointing. Foreign keys (many to one) were not implemented as reference to Java objects, so I had to code this myself.

What I like with JPA is the feeling to be isolated from the DB specificities without being tight to one JPA provider. I switched just to try from Hibernate to TopLink to EclipseLink, it works great.

Building Java Swing application is rumored to be a pain. With Netbeans it is relatively confortable.... You can drag and drop components on forms as you do with Delphi or VB.

The interface builder is doing something very nice. By looking at how you position components it deduces rules you would like to see respected. Nice, things get properly aligned and are well adaptative when you expand windows. Conceptually that's perfect.

Yesterday, I was almost finished with the app, being able to lease out and log book returns... Unfortunately I tried to fix a couple of glitch in the status bar of the app. What I did? Don't know. The net result is that after three hours of work last night, my entire layout collapsed and the app is basically unusable at this stage...

What about the Java Store annoucement ?

I haven't commented yet on this announcement related to a "Java store".
So here is my comment on "Why the Java Store has Gotten a Luke Warm Reception" on Dzone":
Unfortunately,I have to agree. Sun has a long track record of late half delivering higly expected promised technologies. I think their marketing decided years ago not to listen to customers and developpers and prefers announcing products they would like instead of those developped by their engineers.

I really like Java but I profoundly regret that this platform is unable to deliver boxed/publicly available polished products which is basically what the so called Java stored should be aimed at. So this will be the most powerful empty store on the Internet.

Ps: the orginal blog announcing the Java store.

Apache Pivot - What is it ?

So I spent a bit of time this week-end with Apache Pivot (release 1.1).

It is a completely new GUI toolkit / framework built on top of Java2D. So it is not Swing, nor native browser controls.

This puts it in my opinion in the category of LRTW software (Lets Reinvent The Wheels). As mentioned in my first post, rendition is far from perfect.

The provided elements are good for layouts and containers but lack for me a good rich text editor - I think to get Java really on the desktop and shining for little businesses we need a programmable Java written office suite.

The interface can be built in Java or using an XML Based language: WTKX. May be this is more comfortable for some designers... Event handling plumbing seems to be in Java only - there is an empty scripting section in the tutorial so may be there are possibilities to declare event handler.

Pivot also includes utilities for data-binding (the stuff we miss in Java since years and you could find in VB or Delphi since day 0) and JSON (data exchange over HTTP), internationalization is also covered (I did not check it).

So my first opinion: this seems to be an open Java based Flex a like solution.

Unfortunately the deployment of the Java plugin is not comparable to Flash and the rendition if far from what you would get with native controls -e.g with Ajax or GWT.

Event being handled locally, so Pivot falls short compared to for example ZK / Echo and I think Canoo. In the demo I could not see an example with multiple windows / MDI like interface.

The tutorial is still incomplete. My statement : good open source = good documentation (potentially charge it but please write it if you want to gain quick acceptance).

What's more I could not find an indication of which problems Pivot is supposed to solve.

At this stage I cannot imagine to use it for anything. The project is currently 'incubated'. Except if the project can jump very quickly in term of quality and server based event handling, I don't think it will make long run.