Sunday, 18 August 2002

Java: Eclipse and SWT After coding ThinBlog yesterday in UltraEdit, I thought I'd take another look at Eclipse, IBM's open source Java IDE.  A visitor at work the other day was really enthusiastic about it, but last time I tried it I couldn't even figure out how to create a new project. Anyway, either it's changed a lot (it's up to version 2.0; last time it was pre-1.0) or I've got better at finding dialog boxes, because it seems like a pretty good IDE this time.  The debugger worked nicely to iron out one of the kinks in my code (it wasn't getting the blog name when connecting to Radio as Radio calls it 'blogname' rather than 'blogName'), and it seemed pretty fast. Also, it has documentation now!  Here's the SWT FAQ, which introduces Eclipse's fast GUI library.  Somewhat heftier than Thinlet at 2-3 Mb, but also rather more functional and native-looking.  The detailed documentation goes over the widgets and introduces how to use the library in general. The only downside is that it looks like coding up dialogs will be quite a bit more work than in VS.Net.  Does anyone feel like writing an XUL parser that outputs SWT Java code? ;-) 11:49:50 PM    comment []

Posting from ThinBlog now. Does this work? 3:59:37 AM    comment []

Dabbling in Java After reading on ZOPEN-X about Mike Cannon-Brookes (rebelutionary) and his Java RSS reader, I headed over to take a look at Thinlet, a very very small Java UI library. Thinlet looks very cool.  I've been using C# a lot recently, and have been meaning to learn Java, except coding the UI has always seemed like a big waste of time when I can just go into Visual Studio and hack up a dialog.  However with Thinlet it's just a matter of putting together a little XML. The result of a few hours' hacking (I'm not as quick as Mike :) is a Blogger API client.  I've only tested it with Blogger so far, but it should be able to work with Radio as well. To fit in with the current naming convention, here is: ThinBlog It's not perfect yet, but I've got to get some sleep sometime, so here it is.  About 90K, most of that being taken up by Thinlet and Apache XML-RPC. 3:58:13 AM    comment []

Mac Radio installer now available Thanks to Robert Barksdale (packaging) and Jeff Cheney (testing), PyCS now has a Radio installer for the Mac too! Get onto PyCS quickly from OS X 3:37:19 AM    comment []