Roo’s Ramblings

The HTML rendering component in Java Swing is so dated it’s become a joke. HTML 3.2 compatible with a little bit of support for CSS thrown in - it is not capable of displaying modern websites. Recently, the Flying Saucer project has been delivering a compontent OSS XHTML renderer, which has proved very successful. However, it’s still behind the big names, like Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.

Jrex does things differently. As useful a Java implemented renderer is, Jrex allows you to embed the Gecko rendering engine, which is used in Mozilla-based products, directly in to your Java app. The Gecko engine has the advantage of being a large project with a lot of man-hours already dedicated to it. It’s up-to-date, robust and pretty speedy. So, I’m very glad that this is available.

I thought it was interesting to see that Adobe have released their own PDF API in Java. Sure, it’s only a viewer Javabean, and it’s not open source. However, it’s free to use and it means you can integrate PDF viewing and printing into your applications.

Java.net published an excellent tutorial on making use of this component. When combined with other libraries, like iText - a Java API for PDF generation - then you can have pretty good setup for reading/writing portable documents.

So a minor release for AL has finally come out (Nipple or something). It’s good to see AL still marching on. Things have felt slightly sluggish recently with all the libslay stuff. I mean that with no disrespect to those working in the background - I know lots of people have been working really hard. Now that it’s out of the way we can continue to look forward to other improvements like an updated installer and libpacman to name but two.

It made me think though about my time with Arch over the past 8 1/2 months. It surprises me that I’m still using a distro for this long. It’s not all been plain sailing either - I seem to have regular problems with my Centrino wireless after the occasional pacman -Syu. I’d have normally switched by now to see what else is happening with other distros. However, I’m feeling strangely loyal and have stuck with AL even when I sometimes hungered for a simpler life.

I therefore thought it a good idea to write a follow-up to my previous Arch-related article, A Week in the Life of an Arch Linux Newbie. I thought I’d write about all the cool things AL has been upto over the past 8 months. Such an article may also quell some the complaining in the forums about our Distrowatch position - a bit of publicity to let the Linux-world know that AL is getting on with business; head down, just working

I spent years using gvim as my main editor for everything, including programming. A year or so ago, I started using Eclipse for my Java projects. Eclipse is not a Java IDE per se. It’s an application framework for which JDK programming modules were implemented. However, you have also find modules for developing C++ and Python within Eclipse too.

Eclipse has grown in popularity so much recently that it’s caused the other OSS offerings - and more crucially, the commerical offerings - to really move up a gear, and I think Netbeans is on the verge of becoming a first-class Java IDE.

I recently experimented with NB 5 beta and finally got around to playing with its killer feature, Matisse. This is NB’s new GUI design module and quite frankly it blows the competition out of the water. Writing GUI code is the most tedious task. Getting a few textboxes and labels on screen is fairly straight-forward, but getting the blasted things aligned properly will ensure you lose an hour of your time!

So, check out the Matisse demo to see what the fuss is about. I think I’ll wait until NB5 is released proper and then I’ll trial it for my next Java project, whatever that may be.

Oh my God! Can you Adam and Eve it? I finally have broadband after about 6 weeks of trying. Phew! I’m glad it’s over. As I’ve said a few times when I endured dial-up to post here, I’ve felt so out of the loop. I’ve not run a pacman -Syu during the last 6 weeks either! I’ve barely posted on the forums and work on Jacman practically ground to a halt.

Anyway, all should change now. More silly blog posts. More surreal AL forum posts and more comments from Skoal! Woo hoo

You guessed it - I finally purchased one of those bad boys last Saturday. What can I say? It just rocks!

About 6-7 years ago I got a Sony DiscMan for xmas. It’s lasted me well, but I’ve been wanting to move away from bulky music players for sometime. I’ve been waiting for the size/capacity ratio to reach a decent balance and I think that 4Gb within the volume of a couple of credit cards is good enough. I wasn’t bothered about getting a iPod per se - it’s just that Apple seemed to be the first to release a media player that fitted my needs.

I do think Apple have got most things just about right, so all credit to them. The only feature I wish the Nano had is some sort of normalising facility so that you don’t blow your ear drums between tracks of different volumes. However, I could do some thing myself to this effect by normalising the tracks directly on my laptop before I copy them over.

Anyway, I’m a happy chappy for now, and no doubt all my fellow commuters are happy, enjoying my involuntary tone-deaf singing