Pito’s Blog

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There’s another flame-up on the WebStart commentary on the web, this time under the title “Webstart, now I see why people don’t use it.”

Even though I’ve spoken out about this once or twice, I couldn’t resist weighing in.

Here’s what I wrote:

I have written so much about this in Blogs, newsgroups, etc that I won’t rehash it here; however I will put some links below for those who are interested.

My Bottom lines:

• WebStart is a very promising (I would call it tantalizingly close) approach. The problem is that when you are trying to get people to use your application, the one place where you need to be super robust is in the install and setup and initial user experience, which is exactly where WebStart falls down.
• The BlogBridge project is a major cross platform application that uses Java Web Start. Today there have been thousands of installation. Of the people that have any kind of installation or startup problem, 9 out of 10 are Webstart related. Try BlogBridge’s Web Start experience for yourself.
• Java Web Start is not a solid solution for a cross platform java application that you intend to deploy widely (on the internet not just internally where you can handhold each user)
• BlogBridge will be abandoning WebStart in the next release with Great Regret.
• IMHO Sun is acting contrary to their strategic goals (as stated) by not paying sufficient attention to a major hurdle to succeeding on the desktop and their progress on this front is so slow it’s absurd.
• Sun has heard lots of highly specific technical explanations of where the problems are and what the impact is and they say they understand but don’t act on it.

Here are some links where I wrote about this in the past. I am but one voice in dozens. Click to read:

• From ClientJava.com
• Also from there
• From my blog
• Also from my blog
• And also from my blog

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Amusing. Do you recognize yourself?

And while you are wasting time, how easily can you tell a programmer from a serial killer?

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No, not Eastern Daylight Time, the Swing Event Dispatch Thread. Duh. If the abbreviation EDT doesn’t send shivers up your spine you’re not really a Java Geek. Or maybe you are an uber-geek.

Anyway, I came across this clear and short article explaining the big traps and how to avoid them. It is the SPIN project which implements a way-esoteric-PhD-level technique to make it easier to work with the EDT.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Java Web Start is a piece of Java platform that’s meant to ease the deployment and updating of Java applications. It’s a great idea, but disappointingly implemented. There were several JavaOne sessions about Web Start.

There are some great enhancements coming in Java 5.0 (1.5)

• A semi-miraculous JAR compression technology (called Pack200, who knows why) which in some cases achieves a claimed 10-1 compression. You need to know that Java applications are notoriously huge because and so this is welcome news.

• Beyond this, there are a set of features allowing more control of the placement of shortcuts, onto the desktop, in the start menu, and various other items.

However, disappointingly, I have to say that they still don’t get it. If Java wants to support the creation of no-compromise user experiences on the desktop more is needed:

• there is insufficient control of shortcut placement

• there still is no crossplataform, cross browser, automatic download of the required run time libraries (JRE)

And worse, when asked when these and other deficiencies would get corrected the speaker said something along the lines of: “oh those are good ideas that we are talking about. We’ll consider it for the next release.”

With 1.5 to 2.5 year release cycle this is not really good enough

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I know I do! Here’s a very concise summary of the syntax that will jog your memory when it needs to be jogged!

Syntax for Log4j Cheat Sheet

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Struggling with debugging hairy focus and other UI problems in Swing (Java)? Here’s a handy little tip that I just found out about:

When running a Java application, type Ctrl-Shift-F1 and the VM will dump the components hierarchy into standard output.

p.s. Editorial comment: I question whether I should enter these super-geeky-limited-interest notes here. In the end, as I am using this blog as my personal lab notebook I decided that it’s ok even though it might put some people off. My new standard is that I will precede the title with [geek] to give early warning and allow people to skip it.

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Here’s a handy bit of esoterica: To force Log4J to report on it’s initialization sequence do this:

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In order to debug a hairy problem, I need to step into some Java system
classes (hashmap.java) HashMap.class is to be found in rt.jar, part of the
standard Java distribution (1.4.2_04) but it does NOT have debug info
compiled in.

So what to do? I think I did a pretty exhaustive set of steps but I was still stumped:

• I can’t locate an rt.jar with debug info
• From what I read, you can’t easily rebuild it from the java system sources because some stuff does not compile
• I tried recompiling hashmap.java with -g to get debug info and putting the resulting .class files into a .jar and placing that jar at what I believe is the front of the classpath. I did this in Eclipse by adding it as a library in the project properties, and then moving it “up” to the front. Didn’t seem to do it.
• I tried taking the same built .jar file and putting into the jre spec in Eclipse, at the top, and that didn’t do the trick either

I’ve posted to newsgroups and emailed friends and still have not found the problem.

Bootclasspath to the rescue? From reading around, I have a new angle. It would seem from the above article that in fact, java does not look for the system class jar (rt.jar) where you would expect it to. In fact it looks for it (on Windows) in c:\Program Files\java\J2SDK1.4\ etc. Secondly it looks like before any other class path is searched, the Bootclasspath picks up rt.jar and that is probably why my previous attempts at diagnosis have failed.

Java -X command lists some additional switches to the Sun Java VM, including -Xbootclasspath/p: which that allows you to pre-pend a directory or jar to the bootclasspath.

Popularity: 2% [?]

As I delve into programming esoterica, in the past I’ve written down little handy items of information that I discover through a lot of work, for possible future reference. 6 months later, the details will have escaped me, and so I have my written notes to refer back to. Well, I thought, why not use my blog as a handy place for these  notes?

It’s just one fewer place to look, and who knows someone else might benefit from it. The downside, it will be a jarring bit of geekdom to throw in the middle of my other random ramblings and for many people it would be patently meaningless.

So forgive me ahead of time, this is just another foray into my experimenting with blogs and what they mean and what they are good for. And here we go…

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I’ve had occasion to look into what kinds of rich text editors are availble out there, and I thought I’d use this as a place to record the results, for myself, for you, and for posterity.

Basically I am looking for a Rich Text Editor that can be embedded in a browser based application. Here are the requirements:

- Needs to run cross platform (IE, Mozilla, Safari)
- Doesn’t need to be hugely featureful
- The less of a download the better
- Avoid stepping into a cross platform testing quagmire

So far, here’s what I’ve come up with:

This one looks nice, is lightweight and sufficiently functional.

This one is much heavier weight, and is very functional

I will post more results of my research as I continue. If you know of any that I should take a look at, please drop me a line or post a comment.

Popularity: 2% [?]