Josh On Design

We hear a lot about development processes these days, but I'd like to know what techniques people actually use? Do you create UML diagrams? Do you map out the states? And when it comes down to the actual code, how do you break it up into classes and packages? Does your methodology vary depending on the type of program you are creating?

I was looking at the referers to my Swing has failed article and I noticed a site called Java Hispano.org. I think it's really cool that there is a spanish language java site. This is one of the things I love about the Java community. It brings together people from many different backgrounds, unified by the goal of making high quality reusable software.

I've been playing with Swing a lot lately for my new series of articles. In my research I came across another interesting class java.awt.Robot. It's a class that can automate the UI, mainly for testing. One particularly cool feature is the mouseMove function. Once I saw this I got evil ideas. :) Imagine rogue java programs that move the mouse cursor to mystify and befuddle the user. Spelling out hideous horrible messages. Redrum! Redrum!. :)

When reading discussions about Unix versus Windows versus Mac, I often hear people complain about the Point, Click, and Drool user interface. This is usually directed at the Mac, but I've heard it refer to Windows and even KDE before. These people imply (or sometimes simply state) that powerful computers are hard to use and that these easy to use computers are for mindnumbingly stupid people who can't be trusted with pencils, much less normal computers.

Yes, that's right microwaves are evil. More specifically, the microwave in my office. Or, to get right down to it, the interface on this microwave. You see, it's awful. Just plain awful. And yet, I've seen worse.

I've been writing Swing apps for a long time and despite the speed and API improvements I don't think it's gotten better. After reading

It's been a while since I've written something, so I thought I'd start out with another Swing Hack. This time I've expanded on the overlay idea of SwingHack 3 by adding sort of a magic lens. In this hack the overlaid information can only be seen when the special lens cursor is over it. To pull this off I've created a custom cursor using a buffer image and set it on the glasspane. The buffer contains a crude set of boxes to define the view area, but you could just as easily use an image of a magnifying lens. Next I've restricted the drawing of the glass pane to only be under the cursor by getting the cursor coordinates from a mouse motion listener and setting a clipping rectangle centered around the cursor. Finally I've added code to print the mouse coordinates as part of the cursor. Run, compile, and you get this: (pretend that you can see the cursor which Windows printscreen thoughtfully removes for you)

Chris recently wrote about the jApps One in particular intriqued me: the Dukester a little java box that plays MP3s and can download other things. This fits very nicely with an idea I had a few years ago and always wondered why no one ever did it: good MP3 car stereos.

I have often wondered how people learn to program today. In the old days we had Basic and Logo, but what do kids use today? The old standbys are powerful enough to make something for the web (assuming they even exist) and nothing else has a simple development environment for children. Perhaps we need something new.

I stumbled across an older online magazine recently. A List Apart has a wide variety of topics, ranging from CSS and typography to what a designer truly does for their client. While the discussions range from the technical to the philosophical they always target their stories at designers. They've built a truly useful site and I look forward to their return (it's on hiatus now but should be back soon with new content).

I received an email today asking about my use of the glass pane. It seems this fellow wants to handle right clicks on any component in each screen. A logical request. In most cases your right clicks are not limited to a single component, yet to receive the events required to show popups you have to add a listener to each component! Not enjoyable.

As part of a new project for work I have finally broken down and learned Struts and JSPs. Struts is tremendously useful. I wish it had been around five years ago when I was up to my ears in webbased applications. But JSPs I've never been impressed with. They are good for templating but the combination of java code and html always seemed crufty. I've been minimizing the amount of code I put in them and certainly prefer to use something like XSL to keep the UI and code separate.

It's Friday so I thought I'd do another Swing hack:

There's been an uproar about Phillip Greenspun calling Java the SUV of computer languages lately. I don't agree with the general theme of the entry that a project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a scripting language.

I've been thinking. We have lots of software crashing these days. Some due to bugs. Some due to viruses and worms. Some due to hardware failure. And yet software is becoming more common and important than ever before. So what can we do to make software more reliable? Can it be 100% reliable when it is written by failable humans.

A lot of people have been complaining about the loss of jobs in the programming field, and it's only going to get worse they say. I don't think it's true. There will always be work for the career programmer. We just have to make sure we move up the abstraction ladder. Even in a world where basic coding is done overseas and many components are opensourced, there's still plenty of work to be done, and paid for.

Last week I spent a much needed vacation in The Outer Banks. If you ever see a sticker with OBX in a circle on it, that's the Outer Banks. Beautiful and isolated barrier islands off of the coast of North Carolina, they provide great rest and relaxation. And also the opportunity to think about how technology fits in our lives. I've got lots of new ideas to discuss in my coming entries, but one in particular struck me: Passive technology.

While crusing through the AWT/Swing documentation for another project I ran across a method I never knew existed: Toolkit.setLockingKeyState(int keyCode, boolean on). It's been there since 1.3 (which is what, 3 years old now) but I never noticed it before. Hmm, I thought. What could I use that for?

While working on another project I came up with a silly idea. How could I force windows to remain completely on screen and to snap to the screen edges? A simple form of window snapping. Since you can receive an event every time the window is moved it's easy to create a Component Listener to do it.

I've seen lots of arguments on the merits of weak typing. It encourages flexiblity. It lets me write code faster. I don't worry about the details until later. I can do cool runtime tricks.