Wednesday, December 18, 2002

JellySWT and I'm impressed with SWT I had a couple of hours spare last night so I put together a prototype of JellySWT which is similar to JellySwing, using XML to build rich user interfaces, but uses SWT as the underlying UI technology.   There's an example script here.   So far I've gotta say, I'm very impressed with SWT. The folks at OTI and IBM seem to have done a great job. From never using SWT before to completing the code for JellySWT took me about 3-4 hours; which considering I've just about grokked how to create most SWT widgets and make reasonable layouts, I find pretty impressive.   SWT seems much simpler & more straightforward than Swing - its also really cool that the Layouts to actually work and do not suck! The JellySWT implementation is also much smaller & simple than the JellySwing implementation. 5:48:17 PM    comment []

Jelly sucks? Gump rocks! Jelly sucks. Actually, this looks pretty cool.  Unfortunately, Jelly seems content to perpetually remain in sandbox mode.  Furthermore, it depends on onstable components.  What's worse is that nobody cares. Nudge, nudge. [Sam Ruby] Consider us all nudged Sam :). We'll hopefully get the Gump build of Jelly working soon! For those of you that don't know, Gump is a very useful tool at Jakarta which will rebuild practically all open source projects against CVS HEAD, against each other. This acts as an early warning system so that if things change in CVS breakages in other builds show up pretty soon. While Jelly's build in Maven works fine, there's still some problems in the Gump build which need to be fixed (i.e. that if we were to use later versions of a few things, we'd hit problems). Incidentally recently Jelly got voted into the commons proper, so it'll be moving out of the sandbox soon (when we get chance). 5:11:34 PM    comment []

Ant, Centipede, Maven and the use of scripting Centipede (nope - doesn't suck). From the hacking log: The thing about Centipede is you have full access to ant where you need it. Common functionality can be plugged in easily. You can also easily extend it be creating extents. Yep pretty much agree with you Andy. I wasn't trying to put down Centipede (or Maven for that matter). The point I was trying to make is that these tools, while providing heaps of build functionality out of the box, can get in your way. Simple things like passing system properties to your junit tests can become much harder it should be. Ant also has this problem... you just hit it later. It's the whole leaky abstractions thing again. [The Occasional Blogger] Maven is built on Ant too - so with Ant, Centipede and Maven you get full access to Ant's functionality. Just like in Centipede, in Maven you can break down to the Ant layer and do whatever you'd do in normal Ant Maven has some neat ways to plugin functionality so you can just add some special Ant or Jelly processing before or after any goal is attempted or action performed, so its really easy to solve the remaining 20% of the problems that Maven doesn't solve out of the box. So if you don't like how a particular goal is achived in Maven and the normal customization process doesn't quite fit your needs, just overide it or add your own custom pre or post processing. Also to answer Glen's criticisms of Ant... Ant sucks. Yes, I'm serious. IMHO the design of Ant 1.x is broken. [snip] There are several scripting languages that could do the job. Jython, Judoscript, JRuby, Javascript (Rhino) just come to me mind .  [snip] [Codito ergo sum] I don't agree that Ant sucks though I do agree that it has limitations - which is one of the main reasons the Maven project was started. One really neat part about Maven is that if you need to you hit a leaky abstraction, you can get down to the Ant level to use some custom Ant tasks or you can use some Jelly scripts or you can use a real scripting language like Jython, JRuby, JavaScript if you need to. The integrated expression language Jexl is good enough for most use cases (like iterating over your dependencies etc) but if you need it you can plugin your own favourite scripting language too. Just plug all this into the maven.xml file and your done. 12:37:20 PM    comment []