javootoo.com has a number of look and feel packages for java, including some theme packs for the Skin L&F which lets you use GTK and KDE themes with Java apps. See, there are ways to make Swing look good!
An Austrian company, Together Teamlösungen, has purchased Enhydra from Lutris and released it under the LGPL. Nice.
This makes it seem rather remarkable that the Republicans dropped the drilling of Alaska. Salon.com | Save the Earth — dump Bush is an interview of Robert Kennedy Jr.
The NRDC Web site lists over 200 environmental rollbacks by the White House in the last two years. If even a fraction of those are actually implemented, we will effectively have no significant federal environmental law left in our country by this time next year. That’s not exaggeration, it’s not hyperbole, it is a fact.
Scary stuff. It has been clear to me that Bush has been selling away the environment, but I didn’t realize how far he’s going. I do remember a recent headline saying that the Big 3 automakers were getting some fuel economy concessions. I guess Bush never met a dollar, I mean industrialist, that he doesn’t like.
Take a look at the amazing Kurt Wenner – Gallery of Work. He does a fabulous job of 3D-looking street paintings.
The Eclipse project has announced The Eclipse Visual Editor Projects, which will include extensible reference implementations for SWT and Swing. Unfortunately, the download page for the builds lists Eclipse 2.1.2 as a requirement. Part of the trouble is that GEF doesn’t work under 3.0 yet. So, I could go back to using 2.1. I don’t think I will, though. I like the new stuff in 3.0. I’ve gotten used to hitting ; in the middle of the line and having the ; appear at the end of the line (most of the time).
The Kompany, known for its products for KDE, has released Rekall under the GPL. Rekall is like Microsoft Access, but it works with MySQL and PostreSQL (DB2 as well, but no Oracle yet). So, you get the form builder capability and easy import/export. It is scriptable with Python. They’ve set up a site called Rekall Revealed to host the open source project. Rekall does not rely on KDE, but will run on Windows and Linux using Qt.
There is also a runtime available that appears to be less restricted than the GPLed main product. I’d be curious to give it a try. Looks pretty spiffy from the screen shots.
It sounds like people are getting serious about Linux on the desktop, but this announcement shows just how big it is starting to get:
[Sun CEO Scott] McNealy announced today that the Chinese government has pledged to deploy a million computers in the next year using Sun’s Linux desktop software. The cost: $50 per license for Sun’s desktop software
The more this kind of thing spreads, the more price pressure that will put on Microsoft. Microsoft has huge margins (I believe last quarter they made $2.2 billion in profit on $2.8 billion in Windows revenue!) and plenty of room to wiggle. The problem is that investors are used to Microsoft’s 30%+ net profit margin.
This is really just the beginning, though. Things will really heat up in the years leading up to Longhorn’s release.
A very nice collection of Web Development Bookmarklets for Mozilla. It gives you easy access to all of the scripts used on the page, plus a way to edit the style sheet of the page you’re looking at. (Don’t like the black background? Just change it!)
Among the postings in the java.net thread that I was just talking about, there was a reference to EII Commons which provides:
- a sortable table model and corresponding sortable JTable
- a set of masked edit controls
- a wizard framework (i.e. “< Back”, “Next >”, “Finish”, “Cancel”)
- an Eclipse-like view framework for Swing
- various tree, table, and list utilities
- miscellaneous utilities such as:
- a resource loader (loads images and other resources relative to a class)
- a class that will copy an InputStream to an OutputStream, or a Reader to a Writer
- a class-based processor repository that dynamically delegates
to some sort of processor based on the “best fit” for an object’s class
Joshua Marinacci opened up a big discussion with his java.net blog entry: Swing has failed. What can we do?. He makes some good points, and the discussion that follows has all sorts of interesting input.
(Comment from ocean): There are plenty of valid reasons to criticize Swing but “Swing is not VB” is not one of them. Swing is **not an application framework**.
This is absolutely correct. SWT has already gotten a lot of praise for its use of native widgets, and IBM may get another leg up with the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, which provides an application framework.
A couple of months ago, I went looking for a Swing GUI app framework. I found several, and spent a fair amount of time with Eclipse. Ultimately, what I went with was a combination of approaches provided by different Swing frameworks. This approach is easy to use, removes none of Swing’s power, and provides good flexibility for your application’s model objects.
Wotonomy (and WebObjects) had the greatest philosophical influence on me, because it eliminates a lot of controller code and provides for an excellent separation of concerns.