Entries Tagged 'Software' ↓

Every so often, something goes your way, ya know? So, last Thursday, I posted to sakai-dev asking whether I should use dojox.storage or borrow some stuff from rWiki:

http://www.nabble.com/Flash-storage—-dojo.storage-or-homebrew–td16033853.html

It also just so happens that the main guy behind dojox.storage, Brad Neuberg, apparently felt like being a kind soul, did a ton of refactoring work, and bundled up the smallest, most practical package possible for my immediate need and posted it, not three hours later:

http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2008/03/easy-download-of-dojo-storage-for.html

So far, it’s really easy to use (about 15 total lines, and tastes like HashMap) and moves between browsers very well. I’m only having one issue on IE. It’s choking on line 52 of some unnamed file that a little Googling hints is related to the Flash plugin. (For the curious, it’s an Object Required error in __flash__removeCallback()…)

I guess this can happen with different ways of including SWF files — the confusing bit is that one thread says use the HTML embedding, rather than JavaScript, and another says to use JavaScript rather than HTML. The tricky part is that both seemed to fix it.

So, I’m going to test on a machine that doesn’t have script debugging turned on and hope for the best. If it doesn’t grumble too badly, I’ll poke around for a fix in my spare time.

Either way — Cheers, Brad! You really made my day. -NB

About a year ago, I was anxious that an upgrade from the Visual Editor Project might be included in the Eclipse Europa (3.3) release…

I’m a big fan of the portability, speed, and general native feel of SWT, and I’m generally a fan of the Eclipse setup. I’ve also done a good bit of C# stuff for hacking out GUIs for one-off apps. It’s actually easier than dealing with console scripts and you can hand off an .exe to let someone accomplish something without a proper shell. Given that working with Sakai is pretty Java-intensive, and that I was bouncing between OSX/XP, I figured these lightweight admin-style GUIs could be hacked together in SWT… Boy, was I wrong.

I admire the complexity of a GUI builder that generates all kinds of layout code, etc. It’s definitely not something I want to take on as a project right now. But, I’m pretty frustrated with the VEP. It missed the Europa bundle — no big deal, I thought — “there’ll be a package soon enough; this is important stuff”. Along comes October (three full months later), and this is posted on the main page:

To my knowledge, this is the only official status update from the VEP since. While scraping the blogs and forums, I found one guy who seems to be maintaining unofficial builds, but I don’t see any active development at all. If you’re dangerous, you can check out http://www.ehecht.com/eclipse_ve/ve.html — he even has a Ganymede M3-compatible bundle — I’m too scared disinterested busy to spend the time.

And now that NetBeans has released 6.0 with cleaned up usability and the actually-funded Matisse, I’m really starting to wonder if I should give it another look. Another really cool feature I saw demoed was live model diagrams with full round-tripping right in the IDE. And they seem to have a BPEL designer integrated, which tickles my SOA side.

I’m not giving up on Eclipse, but I treat free software kind of like free agency: I use and probably contribute to what works for me. The adoption/switching cost is based on learning/porting time and, for an IDE, I figure that to be about two weekends of hacking to get productive. If I can crank up and save a few hours at a crack by being able to whip up a GUI and evolve a new data model with autodiagrams, it’s pretty tempting. -NB