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    Book Updates

    April 17th, 2012

    Building Mobile Applications with Java Using GWT and PhoneGap

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    Tagged: java ebook phonegap gwt canvas

    AppBundler is now an independent project

    March 26th, 2012

    Over the weekend I moved app bundler to its own project. It is now hosted on GitHub and has a real Ant task.

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    Tagged: java

    My final draft is done: Building Mobile Applications with Java

    February 17th, 2012

    The book is done!

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    Tagged: ebooks java

    Java + SDL + Avian + webOS = Magically Delicious

    August 31st, 2011

    Mmmwaa haa haa. It lives! I've gotten Java to run on webOS natively with a new set of Java SDL bindings. That means it just *might* time to start a new project. Read on for how it works and how you could help.

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    Tagged: graphics java palm programming

    Any HTML Renderers for Java?

    February 3rd, 2004

    I haven't written anything in a while because it was a busy Christmas season, Kimi is going back to school along with work, Lizi has to be fixed, and I started an exciting new job in the field of document management. But more on all of these later. Back to technology.

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    Tagged: java java.net

    Swing Hack 7: Let it Snow!

    December 22nd, 2003

    I've always wanted to make some sort of display that draws outside of a window with images scattered all across the screen. Though previously impossible in Java, I found a way to do it. And since Christmas is coming up I thought I'd use it to make a snowflake display. Here's a cropped screenshot of what it looks like:

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    Tagged: java swing-hacks java.net

    Spanish Java

    December 12th, 2003

    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.

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    Tagged: java swing java.net

    Swing Hack 6: Ghost Mouse

    December 9th, 2003

    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!. :)

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    Tagged: java swing-hacks java.net

    Swing has failed. What can we do?

    November 10th, 2003

    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

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    Tagged: java swing

    Swing Hack 5: a magic lens

    November 5th, 2003

    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)

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    Tagged: java swing-hacks java.net

    How about a jApp for my car?

    October 21st, 2003

    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.

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    Tagged: java java.net

    Swing Hack 4: The universal right click

    October 3rd, 2003

    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.

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    Tagged: java swing-hacks java.net

    I have seen the light.

    October 2nd, 2003

    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.

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    Tagged: java philosophy java.net

    Swing Hack 3: Overlay Graphics

    September 26th, 2003

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

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    Tagged: java.net java swing-hacks

    SwingHack: keyboard spinner

    August 28th, 2003

    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?

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    Tagged: java swing-hacks java.net

    Swing Hack: Window Snapping

    August 22nd, 2003

    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.

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    Tagged: java swing-hacks java.net

    Where are my free JavaBeans?!

    August 11th, 2003

    I have a webserver. It's a small box sharing a friend's static DSL line with a few other boxes. It does the job pretty well, hosting the websites for my family members. When the blogging revolution hit I wrote some journaling software for myself. It was written in Perl originally, later switching to a servlet with XSLTs. This was great for me but not so great for my sister when she wanted a weblog. She can write HTML and copy links. That's about it. No javascript and certainly no knowledge of XSL templating. My solution was to switch to JSPs. I told her as long as you don't edit these magic tags everything will be fine. All is good until she says she wants a counter.

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    Tagged: java java.net

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