So what’s wrong with Mac OS X?
Published by admin on
Thursday, November 26, 2009 - 04:45:36
- Filed under General, News, Development
Only one small thing: Java.
Right now there are no less than 7 bugs related to the use of the SWT/SWT_AWT Browser opened for the Mac OS X platform on the Eclipse bugzilla system.
These bugs affects the browser suite on the platform, and even if you develop on Windows or Linux, your client may be on Mac so you will be affected too! All this to say that if you have 5 minutes to spare, please vote for a quick fix of these bugs - just register on the eclipse.org site, and add your vote.(You will see the complete list with some explanations in the Browser Suite FAQ pdf, just look at the last chapter: What are the know issues/bugs?)
And yet the worst ones, those which made me doubt that there ever will be a Mac OS X version, are now all fixed!
First there is the problem with the architecture. For those, like me, coming from the old days of Apple, you know that once upon a time there was a very special system, Mac OS, which was revolutionary then but whose binaries where not easily portable… The ROM of the Mac hardware was making all the difference because a good part of the system was already there, and notably UI code.
I still have the first 5 volumes of “Inside Macintosh” - the programmer’s bible, which still today are very good UI guidelines. There was the fundation of almost every UI widgets you use everyday.
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Moving forward, getting deeper…
Published by admin on
Monday, November 23, 2009 - 03:55:59
- Filed under General, News, Development
So I was happy with my little integration of DJ-NativeSwing as a plugin (3 plugins in fact: one for the browser, one for the flash player and one for the html editor).
I knew that they would be better implemented as beans because they were real components, and they had a UI, so I needed to rewrite the whole thing to make this easier to use, and make them Servoy-Aware (you can attach a data provider to them) and have a bunch of properties and event callbacks, and still be fully scriptable… Quite a lot to write, really, although I could sense that the DJ-NativeSwing API was solid and well written and allowed for all of this.
I had some discussions in PM about that with a few Servoy users, and I sensed that there was some real interest but all I could tell these guys was that there was no support for Mac OS X yet.
Still I tried, mostly stealing Mac time from colleagues at work, to try deploying DJ-NativeSwing with SWT, and trying MozSwing as well, and even plain Mozilla XULRunner to see what was working or not and trying to understand why.
I had tons of trouble finding a way to deploy XULRunner from JNLP using an <installer-desc> node.
Most of the times it was just not working, and sometimes it had the weirdest of behaviours, like launching an instance of windows in Parallels Desktop for example! I’m telling you: Java Web Start is a very strange beast! And on Mac OS X particularly. In the end I wrote my own XULRunner installer that I can rely on, or at least debug ;-)
I managed to make the MozSwing demo to work on Mac OS X Tiger, but couldn’t make DJ-NativeSwing to launch at all. I even started to think that maybe I could write a regular implementation on Windows/Linux and a special (limited) implementation using MozSwing for Mac OS X. Easier said than done.
In the meantime I did the SVGBean, and was quite happy about it, but I still had these plugins waiting for me in my Eclipse workspace, and I was playing around that from time to time. I knew that if I was to embark on that thing, it could take a big effort to release it to the public.
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How to finish a big project to start an even bigger one…
Published by admin on
Sunday, November 22, 2009 - 06:37:29
- Filed under General, News, Development
I can tell you that’s what happened to me 3 months ago.
I was happy to have finally finished my marathon series of tutorials on how to build Servoy-Aware java beans for Servoy, with a web compatible bean and all the bells and whistles. A bit fed up with MS Word as a primary tool, to tell you the truth: there’s not even code completion in this thing!
So it was a good time to rest a little and enjoy some free time experimenting a few of the mad stuff I had in mind without having to explain every single line of code (which actually goes a lot quicker :)
So I went back to one of my pet project (I have a few - don’t ask), this one started with the disgust I had with the java HTMLEditorKit class: the base of all html rendering/editing in pure Java. The worst piece of software that Sun has ever made, if you ask me.
So I thought: I can’t be alone frustrated with this stuff! Surely there are some clever guys out there who have found a better way to deal with html rendering and editing in Java. And I googled for it, believe me, I did. But felt even more depressed after that:
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The browser Suite is here! Check it out!
Published by admin on
Friday, November 20, 2009 - 03:18:45
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
As demonstrated ‘live’ during Servoy Camp by the mysterious Mister P. (ask Bob Cusik about it) this ’sweet’ suite of native components (Web Browser, Flash Player and Html Editor) is ready for you to try on Servoy 5!
You will find it on the related page of the main site.
Soon on this very blog you will hear everything about the making of this stuff, all the nitty, all the gritty, all the details… but first I have to recover from a very bad flu thanks to the nice Denham climate.
You will hear about the battle to get this stuff work on all major platforms, why Mac OS X is such a case in itself and all the fun stuff involving Mac threading model, the Eclipse SWT bugzilla system being my best friend, how I went to Canada to work with a french guy with 6h delay in communication, and generally why I was so quiet during these last weeks…
I could write a book about it, but fear not, I will spare you the thread dump ;-)
Soon I will put up a google-code site or sourceforge.net site to give access to the source. I still need to find a way to publish the 4 related Eclipse projects along with the configuration stuff and installer related files in an easy to use SVN or CVS repository, with as little manual tweaking required as possible.
In the meantime, if you do try the stuff, I’d like to hear about it: the whole idea of releasing this stuff before v1 is to get as much feedback as possible on the widest range of configurations, uses and abuses, and get as much DETAILED report as possible.
So email me your bug reports, feature requests, suggestions, comments, insults and everything you want to say about it, using the contact form or via PM on the Servoy forum.
No fuss, no Stuff?
Published by admin on
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 - 03:59:44
- Filed under General, News, Announcements
Yeah, I know, I have been very quiet lately…
I’m sorry about it. It shouldn’t be long now before I put some very new stuff on the web site and I will explain everything IN DETAILS to everyone interested. Promised.
In the meantime I did some cleaning in this blog and unfortunately I had to disable comments so you will only be able to send me comment using the email function. This is only because I was tired of deleting these pesky link to russian porn crap every day or so, it seems the anti-spam system of this blog is not powerful enough, so I will need to see later what I can do about it.
Thanks to the sad buggers who find nothing more interesting to do with their lives than polluting others web site, for the very dubious gain of one more link to their erotic crap and viruses!
The only good news today is that I updated the SVG bean to support full transparency (you will find 2 new properties on the bean: background and opaque - both scriptable as well), you can download the new version from the SVGBean related page on the main Servoy Stuff site.
Going to Europe for the next two weeks so don’t expect much more news but when I will be back, I will be back for good! ;-)
Cheers!
