Swing Fuse - Style Injector

Just reading through some blogs and I found about Swing Fuse. So I just went on to read little more about it. Programming in swings for over an year, I never thought or wished you need such a feature. But when I saw Swing Fuse, I wonder how could I spent an year without even thinking something like will be required.

Swing Fuse will be very much useful when we create rich client application. Swing fuse is not for traditional swing programmer who use Swing as it comes from Sun. (like me!) But when you create rich looking applications swing fuse comes really handy. When you work with rich client apps, UI and colors are most important and it keep changing. So hard coding them in a code is not a good idea and swing fuse is the solution for this. Just inject the UI information.. That's it!! pretty cool ah! Didn't try this out.. but looks promising... More about Swing Fuse is here..

http://www.javalobby.org/articles/swing-fuse/

Keep Swinging till then.. Good bye..!

Microsoft surface

Microsoft surface is a cool technology from Microsoft and it defines a new way to interact with the computers.. Very impressive.. waiting to see it, guess it will be available in US by end of 2008 and surely will take some 1 or 2 years to reach India.

Great... Have look here!

http://www.on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/Default.aspx

Java IDE wars !

When I first started Java programming in school days, I never loved Java as I love it today. That's mainly because of the lack of IDE (actually I didn't aware of one). In good old days, when we started learning Java, we used notepad to write java code. At the same time we learnt VB, which comes with a cool IDE. I never knew that such thing exist for java as well...

But my ignorance didn't last for a long time.. I came to know about Eclipse and later exposed to couple of other IDE. Still I love and use eclipse in my day to day work. I tried using Netbeans, but I didn't like it.. Some basic features like a. Progressive search (available in 6.0), b. Call Hierarchy etc. are not available in NetBeans (to name a few). There are other IDEs which I haven't used yet.. Some IDEs comes for free and other for cost.

This podcast compares the various IDEs and the feature of IDEs in 2008.. But still Eclipse rocks and I will continue to use Eclipse .....

http://www.javaworld.com/podcasts/jtech/2007/121807jtech007.html

Read-Only Collections...

Recently I was looking at some open source code and I found out that there is utility function in Collections class which could come handy. When you have mutable Collection object and you don't want anybody to edit (add/delete item) the list, you can just derive immutable version of the same object using the following function..

Collections.unmodifiableList();

If somebody tries to edit the derived list, they will get a neat UnSupportedOperationException. You might wonder why would you need such a list.. If you are working on project with some 50 odd people and you need to make sure that your list (which could be used in some other place) should not be modified by any other fellow programmer, this is the right way to do..!

Happy programming !

This could really come handy in some scenarios as I said above..

Good Bye!

Java and Vista not playing well together....

Well, we all are dreaming about vista the new operating system from MS. Eventhough we have many good news about vista, there are few bad news about it too... When the project was initially started, Vista has got hell lot of features, but as days passes by MS stop many planned features of vista, atleast for this release. I got a newsletter explaining that Aero Effect of Vista is not coming along with Java GUI stuff. Take a look at the news letter I got...

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Two items at dzone.com caught my eye this week and seemed worth mentioning to you. First, barring the occurrence of some major unforeseen problem, Microsoft is just one final test version away from releasing the “golden master” of its new Vista operating system. This is really big news for both Microsoft and the industry as a whole, even if Vista has lost several of its more intriguing features during the years of its development. Vista is the next wave of big business for Microsoft and for legions of ISVs, system integrators, OEMs and resellers whose economic prospects are tied in with those of the industry leader. (Note: I have to tell you I made a Freudian slip when first typing the previous sentence, typing “bug business” rather than “big business.” Of course, “u” and “i” are very close to one another on the keyboard) Many billions of dollars are at stake with Vista, numbers so huge most of us probably cannot even begin to comprehend their scale. For Microsoft to be just one final “test version” away from finalizing its next big thing is major news for our whole industry, if not for the global economy.

The second item was a disconcerting one, at least one the surface of things. It appears that Vista and certain desktop Java applications do not play well together. One of the most prominent features of Vista is the “Aero” graphics effects that give the Vista UI its distinctive, high-gloss appearance. In testing at eWEEK Labs it was discovered that running Swing or Eclipse SWT applications can cause this slick-looking Vista eye candy to be completely disabled, at least on the recent pre-release build 5728 of Vista. If you’re interested in more details, then a nice discussion of this problem and its possible causes and solutions is available in the forums at Javalobby.

So, let’s put two and two together. Vista is just one final test version away from being released to production, and Java desktop applications are somehow disabling the slickest and most visible part of the new Vista interface. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think this is potentially a very sticky situation. I have not heard any indication that this problem is the result of some new conspiracy involving either of the former archrivals, Sun and Microsoft. On the contrary, it seems to be a genuine case of a regrettable technical problem that is getting noticed very late in the game, perhaps too late for it to be fixed before Vista is finalized. Another interesting dzone.com link last month, “Microsoft's Process: What it takes to get a bug fixed before Vista ships” made clear how impressively difficult it is to get changes made to Vista. Judging from that description, it will be a minor miracle if this Java/Vista problem is successfully resolved. Ooops!

Courtest : http://www.javalobby.com

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This too from javalobby...

Interesting, it seems that in the most recent post-RC1 build of Vista (5728) when you run Java applications (either Swing based or SWT-based, like Eclipse) not only are the Aero/Glass effects disabled for the individual application, but completely disabled on the desktop until you close the Java application.

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Well, some argue that it's Vista fault, it's related to OpenGL Driver...

It's related to OpenGL usage. You may need to download an OpenGL driver from Khronos that is native Vista compatible, otherwise it will an old non-Vista aware OpenGL driver which I've heard disables the Vista compositing stuff. You either have to uninstall your 3D card specific OpenGL driver and let the default MS Vista OpenGL->DirectX wrapper work, or, you need a new Vista approved OpenGL ICD.

It's not Java specific. Any OpenGL app that is windowed and not full screen will cause the problem. I think only NVidia offers a beta ICD driver for Vista that is compatible with Aero.

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I'm waiting for Vista... but hell i need to buy a new PC to run that.... :(