Seriously Impressive: Sun Java Studio Creator - Ubuntu's killer app?

Pete Ryland pdr at pdr.cx
Wed Dec 13 14:09:59 GMT 2006


On 13/12/06, Chanchao <custom at freenet.de> wrote:
> What acts (finally) in Java's favour is the free tools available. Rapid
> Development tools.  You can drag and drop a bunch of fields, right-click
> to bind them to your database table, right click again to specify some
> user entry validation snippets and click 'run' and it'll pop up in
> Firefox exactly the way you dragged and dropped the stuff.

There are so many fallacies in thinking that these RAD tools actually
help.  Fine, they make a simple thing look simple, but try to do
anything complicated or maintain the code over any significant period
of time and you're forced to jump through hoops or end up hacking
machine-generated code with a text editor anyway.  But then the text
editors that come with most of these tools barely support
cut/copy/paste, and pale into comparison with the facilities available
in emacs or vim.  Why would I want to use a crappy text editor as a
trade off for typing myconnection = db.connect("dbname").  And of
course they don't just do a simple connect to your database; they'll
automatically analyse your database and create EJBs for each of your
tables for you to access your data through by a scalable (aka
serialized) method call.  Just say no.

My suggestion is to buy a book or print a manual to learn *thoroughly*
either vim or emacs.

BTW, you may also be interested in a very simple-to-use python gui
library I'm working on which turns methods into buttons.  Having not
done anything with GTK+ for a few years, I wanted to write some simple
frontends with PyGTK, and found little improvement in the learning
curve since GTK1.0.  So I've actually set out to simplify the creating
of simple GUIs whilst still trying to allow the flexibility that
people have come to expect.  I've only released prototypes of this so
far, which currently only live on my blog which in case anyone's
interested is here:

http://pdr.cx/~pdr/blog/geekstuff/egg20061018.html

It firstly provides all the basic stuff like a menu bar with help menu
and about box, a tool bar, and a status bar, all with a minimal amount
of code.  It then allows you to use ordinary method definitions to
automatically create menu items, tool bar items, and normal widgets
like buttons, check boxes, etc by wrapping them with a decorator.  The
docstring becomes the tooltip, stock items are used if the method name
corresponds, and parameters are checked to see what type of item
should be created.  So for example:

def open(self, filename):
    """Open a file (read-only)"""
    file = open(filename)
    ...

This can be placed in a menu list to create a menu item that will use
the stock "open" icon and short-cut key and will launch a file open
dialog to get the filename sent as the argument to this method.  IMO,
GUI programming should be this easy.

Sorry for the divergence of the topic, and for the pimping, but I
thought it might be of interest.

Pete



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