Busy again!
Published by admin on
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 07:22:37
- Filed under News, Development, Plugins/beans
Someone on the forum asked a special feature for the busy plugin: basically adding support for dialogs (aka FID).
Optimistic as ever, I thought it was going to be easy, and a good opportunity to get rid of the getMainApplicationFrame() which was a deprecated method anyway (already deprecated in 3.5.x apparently).
My best bet for a replacement was the IClientPluginAccess.getCurrentWindow() method, which was supposed to return
“the current showing window (Dialog or Frame). Use this one as a parent if you want to display a dialog or other frame.”
Except that even in a dialog (modal or not), this method always returns the main JFrame, which is not very useful when you want to access the GlassPane of a specific JDialog.
As a workaround, I had to loop over the Window[] array returned by the Window.getOwnedWindows() method, check for instanceof JDialog and also check the name of the JDialog, which means that the user is now obliged to provide it when calling the plugin inside a FID…
I don’t know what to think: is it a case of misleading comment in the API (it wouldn’t be the first), or simply a bug? And when fixed will I be able to clean up this expansive and not that elegant piece of code that is hurting my sensible eyes?
Anyway, something as straightforward as getting the handle of a Dialog turned out to be a case of minor headache: Murphy’s law striked again :)
Tutorial 2 - Part 1 - get it while it’s hot!
Published by admin on
Monday, June 29, 2009 - 17:10:54
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy
Everything you always wanted to know about beans in Servoy (but were afraid to ask).
Starting gently (or so it seems) with this first part of the definitive bean tutorial: how to use regular beans with scripting in Servoy, you can download it in the tutorials section of the Servoy Stuff web site, right where it should be.
The next parts will be more involved as we will dig deeper into the Servoy public API unknown territory: we will wrap our bean into a Servoy-Aware bean and keep adding functionalities until in the end, at last, everything is revealed!
So fasten your seat belt and get ready for the ride…
And as usual, feel free to comment and beg for more ;-)
The browser war will never end!
Published by admin on
Friday, June 26, 2009 - 02:27:59
- Filed under General, News, Development
… And we’ll all be casualties!
Today I noticed a problem in a form where I used my DateChooserBean, in the smart client it worked perrfectly fine, in IE 7 no problem (I didn’t dare trying it with IE 8 yet), but in Firefox 3, the calendar button was pushed past the end of the input box :{
You see I’m not a very conventional web developer. Most of the web gurus only swear by Firefox, and when I test their sites with IE, I got bugs all around. Now I know that my primary target for the web is still IE 7. You don’t believe me? Look at these stats taken from the Servoy Stuff statistics for this past month:
[Read More…]
The unofficial list of official web compatible plugins
Published by admin on
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 08:34:38
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Plugins/beans
One of the things that frustrated me the most from the beginning with Servoy was the lack of information about the included plugins.
Not only were there no example solutions for each of them, the “how-to build a plugin” amounted to one(!) page dated from the time of Eclipse 2.1.2 (when 3.5 is due in a week!), and the public API lacked the most basic comments in the javadocs!
But most of all there was no way to know if a plugin was going to break our solutions in the web client other than building test solutions and wait for the Exceptions flooding the logs…
You see, I knew full well that some of my colleagues would innocently use some of these “not usable” plugins (like the dialogs or the menu plugins, for example) inside our future Servoy projects and then I would be the one trying to make that mess work seamlessly in the web client, so I really wanted it to be crystal clear what could be used and what couldn’t.
[Read More…]
Back to the bean tutorial
Published by admin on
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 - 04:13:11
- Filed under General, News, Announcements
After a small intermission :) I’m back preparing/writing my next big tutorial on “how to build a bean for Servoy”.
Right now I’m in the preparing phase of the tutorial, meaning that even if I have a rough idea of where I want to go and how I want to go there and what I want to show, there’s still some stuff to prepare before because I don’t want spend too much time on silly details, but concentrate on really interesting/important stuff…
For the moment, I have an idea that this bean will be based on the JSlider (and possibly an alternate round knob component), but basically there are a few different uses you could think of for such a component: it could be used as a navigation widget (just like the standard navigator on steroid :), it could be used to show and edit numerical values graphically, - but then it will need to work on double/float as well as int -, it could even be used to show some progress graphically for a lengthy process (just like a JProgressBar, but with a different look)…
[Read More…]
A bit of cleaning
Published by admin on
Monday, June 22, 2009 - 08:51:06
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
When I implemented the DnD File bean, I added i18n support for toolTipText and the Omit popupmenu command.
Which made me realize that the DateChooser Bean was not i18n ready!
So it is now updated it to v1.03, with i18n support.
And while I was at it, I also changed the menus of the main Servoy Stuff site, because the plugins and beans pages where starting to get too crowded. From now on each plugin/bean will have its own page.
That’s spring cleaning on summer’s solstice for you!
Now some people would think that I was just having a rest, eh?
DnDFile Bean created
Published by admin on
Monday, June 22, 2009 - 08:14:40
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans
I have been side-tracked again, this time because of a personal request (Harjo, this is your fault this time ;-) that I found an interesting challenge:
Basically, to build a plugin or bean that would implement simple drag and drop of files from the windows explorer or mac finder.
I explored a little bit of the possibilities, and in the end, the result is a brand new bean that will allow you to add a “drop target” surface to any form, and even to transform a form’s background and disabled/non editable objects into a drop surface where you can drop any kind of files.
You were waiting for the next major release of Servoy to get that kind of things?
Wait no more, Servoy Stuff give it to you today ;-)
[Read More…]
Video preview of upcoming tutorial
Published by admin on
Friday, June 19, 2009 - 06:40:49
- Filed under News, Announcements, Plugins/beans
I just made a video to give you something to wait for: it shows the next component that I am going to explain at length in a new series of tutorials. About Servoy Beans this time!
In the video you will see two components in the context of the first (prequel) tutorial that will be about how to use these two components in Servoy with build-in Java integration (thanks to Rhino).
In the following tutorials, we will have a look at how to go even further by wrapping around these components to build a full featured Servoy Aware Bean, that will be released as Open Source (of course) and usable in any Servoy client (with Servoy v4.1+). Anyway, that’s the plan ;-)
There might as much as 6 to 8 tutorials in this series… you have been warned!
Download the video here (avi file in a zip archive to save some bandwidth, total is 8,77 MB).
Is there any advantage of using plugins vs modules?
Published by admin on
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 - 04:33:56
- Filed under Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy
Ian Cordingley posted a comment lately, asking if, in terms of performance, it is better to write plugins or to code in Servoy?
I understand (and share) his enthusiasm when looking at the world of possibilities that is opened by the use of plugins and beans, however I would say that whether it is better or not is debatable.
It is true that theoratically running Java code should have a good speed advantage over running JavaScript because the latter must be compiled as Java code first to be executed by Servoy.
Having said that, it’s true that the Rhino lib is pretty powerful so the speed difference shouldn’t be too noticeable - unless you are doing brute force calculations or heavy java code lifting :)
The real question is: is it better to encapsulate your “discrete” pieces of code in Java for better reuse rather than write modules in Servoy?
[Read More…]
Tutorial 1 - Part 3 is finished
Published by admin on
Monday, June 15, 2009 - 05:42:21
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans
It did take a lot longer than expected due to hosting problems (now fixed thanks to Robert Ivens, see below), and various other projects and requests that slowed me down me a little bit: servoy-click client try-out, busy plugin to fix, jasper reports alpha to test and a complete rewrite of the Servoy Stuff site in php before migration.
And you thought I was just enjoying my week-end didn’t you?
Anyway it’s done, it’s 26 page long and packed with condensed information on how to build a plugin for Servoy, with all the gory details. I hope that it will convert more Servoy developers to dig into Java (at least make them less afraid of the “dark side” :)
As we say in French “plus on est de fous, plus on rit!”.
It is available from the “tutorials” section of the main Servoy Stuff site.
