MevenideNetbeans2.0

I've been trying to download this Maven plugin for NetBeans for a few days now. For a while the download link lead to a 404 and now its a 403. If anyone is reading and knows who to contact to correct this, please do.

The Mevenide plugin

Download 

Also why Meven and not Maven? 

Go!Go! file

www.gogofile.com

This is a site a friend of mine created. It is partly based on technology from www.topeverthing.com

Its a very simple interface for exchanging files. I like the simplicity of this site. Give it a try.

JavaOne Day 2 Ponderings

I develop for the web for a living and the funny thing is that I have not touched AJAX yet. So now that I'm JavaOne I've had the opportunity to see the technology in detail.

I find that I have to question this technology. First, I'm in favor of building a better user experience and I think that the current facilities we have for web programming are badly outdated. I am just not convinced however that AJAX is the ticket. To me HTTP's GET, POST and cookie standards have always seemed very arbitrary and limiting. Now what AJAX is doing is building a higher level of complexity on top of a standard that by itself should be replaced. I wish it was practical for all of the web standards and protocols to be re-architected and not just bolt on a new set of standards. Although I know far less about Flex, it seems like a better approach. Flex seems to offer a better ability to encapsulate what the underlying implementation is doing and deliver a more rich user experience.

Also, why are we satisfied with using JavaScript in the browser? It seems like we as developers could do with a more modern scripting language or even compilable Java replacing client-side JavaScript. The JavaScript code that I see is creepy looking and no wonder

JavaOne, applets and calendars

JavaOne is approaching and I've been doing some preliminary work on an applet for a client. I went into my JavaOne schedular and signed up for several Swing-related sessions. Once I completed my schedule I noticed an export to CSV button. This I think is a nice touch but I wondered why there isn't direct support for iCalendar or Outlook's format. It works great for importing into Excel of course but this isn't what I wanted. My goal was to get my schedule into either Thunderbird Lightning or iCal. For a couple of minutes I Googled around trying to find any documentation on the Outlook format since Lightning can import this. I didn't find much. I think decided to have Outlook export something out and I could review it as a sample. Well, this was a dead end because Outlook claimed it needed to instll something in order to export my calendar out as a CSV. I didn't have my install CD handy so I gave up.

I've never used NetBeans before so I downloaded the 5.5 beta to try out the Matisse interface. I was pretty happy with it. I created a simple JPanel derived JavaBean and popped it onto the palette and then used a few in my Swing app. I felt a little confined within NetBeans compared to Eclipse. I needed to deploy some image assets with my Swing app and felt as if I was needing to trick NetBeans into including my images. Finally I felt left out in the cold by NetBeans when I wanted to deploy my app and actually run it outside of the IDE.

One problem I stumped with currently is how to download fonts in my applet. My applet exists along side some Flash and I'd like to keep the fonts consistent. It will be a shame if my applet has to resort to the stock system fonts rather than being able to utilize the nice looking condensed fonts the Flash app is using. 

i’m writing an applet!

Yay. I'm going to try using the Matisse support within MyEclipse and see if it is any benefit.

 However, I must admit that I haven't written a Java applet in 10 years. I remember being at a Christmas party at the end of 1995 and one of my co-workers had just downloaded the Java JDK and had written an applet. I had to try it out too so I wrote an applet that would manage a list of favorites in a list box and then launch a new browser window. Boring yes but it was great fun at the time because Java was such an unknown and cutting edge technology.

A couple of years later I wrote a foreign currency trading applet but the fun was over by this time. I remember messing around with signing jars, etc.

The last time I touched Swing was for a medical records application that served as a smart card reader. A colleague of mine wrote the majority of the Swing but I remember thinking how much of a hassle it is to have to worry about a layout manager, especially since our application would only ever run on Windows anyway. Why I ask has Matisse been so long is coming?
So now after writing web applications and server-side processes in Java for several years, I feel like I've come full-circle and I'm back to writing an applet again. Now if someone wants me to write a Windows 3.1 application using the Microsoft SDK with a WinMain() then I'll really have gone full circle.