Better Swing through dynamic JVM languages...

The holy grail (?) - applying lessons learned in Web App development to Swing/desktop development. We have Python, Ruby, Groovy and now Scala on the JVM. Shouldn't they bring something to the party in terms of making my life easier to make Swing apps - which is still very tedious.

A couple good news items on this front-
Griffon for Groovy - This project shows some great promise! I hadn't been a big Groovy fan mostly because if it looks so much like Java, why not use Java? But then I realize a large impediment to starting up with Python or Ruby or Scala is the learning curve. On closer examination, it seems perhaps Groovy gets the benefits of a dynamic language while still in the overall "framework" of Java. That would be nice. One might say, 'but without the "buzz" it won't get the vast libraries of Python' - true, except for the extent to which it can just use the vast array of Java libraries. Is there an impedance mismatch? Don't know.

Monkeybars for JRuby - I just came across this project yesterday. (See http://groups.google.com/group/monkeybars) It seems to have a lot of the right objectives. The interesting thing is that there is no Ruby API for Swing components - you do the actual Swing components in a Java class and the Ruby code introspects the bytecode to manipulate stuff. Well, plausible I guess.

But interestingly, I've still not come across any Python-Swing or Scala-Swing toolkit/frameworks.

Singletons gone bad - again

I've been successful at using the swing framework, org.jdesktop.application classes in particular. I have a handful of applications sharing a rather large code base. Now however, of course we want to launch application B from application A. It actually works, but the problem is now that the Application singleton became B instead of A and when the objects in the A application go to use their resource map or action map, the get application B which of course isn't an A, so ClassCastException results. Ugh.

Option A: don't use ResourceMap and ActionMap.
I've already headed in this direction because of NetBeans' issues around keeping track of which class is the true application when it is generating code - so that wouldn't be all bad.

Option B: create one master application perhaps deriving from a new class MultipleFrameApplication extended from SingleFrameApplication. It would know how to create a new JFrame, etc. Arguments could be passed in to specify which "real" application to run - which in this case would mean which view to show first.

Option C: pass application A to the new view for application B. But somewhere we need a new JFrame, etc.

I have a related issue in that my model and helper (controller?) classes have common base classes and the models are singletons. So when application B launches, I'm not sure I want a whole new B model which would replicate the base classes of model A.

Hmm...

NetBeans (6.1) lost my code!

Things were going so well... I had created a Java Desktop application, got a desktop pane going, a dialog and an internal pane. It was now time to take a step back, refactor a little and etc.

I renamed my project, created a project group and BOOM! No more code. After a day or so reading about various frameworks, etc. and figuring out NetBeans 6.1 I got the program running in about an afternoon. Now I have nothing.
And now I have to Join Netbeans.org to post a message about this. Forget about it! My joining wiki.netbeans.org apparently wasn't good enough. My subscription to nbannounce was not good enough. FUGGET ABOUTIT!

The GUI builder was fairly good - but I'm going back to IntelliJ.

Frustrating: GWT InvocationException

I am having some success with GWT - but here's one that took me a couple hours to figure out. I created an asynchronous RPC service. Pretty much straight from the "book". Wouldn't work - wouldn't work. Tore everything back to the bare bones. (OK - the service was taking a user-defined class as an argument and returning a list.) I changed it to take a String and return a String. Still always got the InvocationException - with no cause. Finally also ripped the RemoteServiceServlet back to the basics -- did I mention I implemented the init and service methods to allow setting up other stuff I needed? Lo and behold it started working! Doh!
In the simple minded version I originally wrote it wasn't going to actually service anything, just initialize. By calling super.service(request, response) things went much better. Sometimes it IS just the simple problems.

Interesting: IntelliJ

My IDE travels have taken me back to IntelliJ for a tour with the EAP version of IntelliJ 7.0. So far - very nice! Great Maven integration. Great GWT integration! Only locked up on me once - I had three projects open and went to debug one of them.

Frustrating: Java on Mac OSX

As you probably know, Leopard came out recently. Lots of us have been waiting to upgrade. But it turns out that one of the things *NOT* coming in Leopard is Java 6! Java 6 has been out for other platforms for quite a while. Apple used to be way behind, then caught up, but now is dropping behind again! I got a note from another news group that there is a grass-roots movement going on to demonstrate to Apple that there is a LOT of interest in this. It is in that spirit that I post this secret message to Apple: 13949712720901ForOSX.

More Frustrating: Eclipse

Why does a "Dynamic Web Project" require javax.persistence? And it seems, therefore can't be deployed to the HTTP Preview (which is Jetty under the covers, right?)? And what is different between HTTP Preview and HTTP Server?

Only two facets are defined on the project: "Dynamic Web Project" and "Java", neither of which it will let me remove. I really *don't * want persistence...