[ajug-members] Who does client application work?

Mon Dec 19 19:45:35 EST 2011

I'll see what I can do.  I've lost the android portion of the application
due to a hard drive crash, but it should't be too hard to recreate.

I'm assuming you are more interested in the mini golf app than the printing
applet ;)

Summers Pittman
>>Phone:912 293 2314
>>Java is my crack.

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Charlie Walker <maverick67 at gmail.com>wrote:

>  Wow, you should demo that at an upcoming ajug!!
>
> --
> Charlie Walker
> Sent with Sparrow <http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig>
>
> On Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Summers Pittman ℝ wrote:
>
> I've done some non enterprise applications at work this past year. Here
> are a few.
>
> I made a virtual golf game that used an Android phone and computer vision
> to line up and make the shot.  This application was interesting.  First I
> wrote a game using JMonkey in Java which would display a 3D miniature golf
> course and AR tracking tags.  The other half was an Android application.
>  The phone would determine the angle it was viewing the various tags at and
> then send that information to the game server as a "stroke".  The game
> would hit the ball at the angle and at a force the user had selected.
>
> For April Fools I wrote an application in Java which would monitor a video
> stream and take a picture when it noticed someone's face took up a certain
> portion of the frame for a while.  It would then take this picture and send
> it to Twitter.  I then set it out with a magic eye photo and let it take
> pictures of my coworkers cross-eyed and publish to the company feed.
>
> We also made a Java Applet to facilitate printing coupons with one of our
> vendors last year.
>
> Summers Pittman
> >>Phone:912 293 2314
> >>Java is my crack.
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 1:43 PM, <acidbriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We've developed a rather large, thin-client Swing application for
> Hospitals.
>
> The client uses technologies such as Spring (dependency injection, xml
> marshaling, authentication etc), Groovy, SwingLabs components, log4j,
> ActiveMQ etc. It worked out quite well; amazingly well actually.
>
> One of the biggest issues is deployment.  We used Web Start, but the real
> issue is JVM deployment.  We have about 1000 machines at a single hospital
> which then requires all of them to have an 'approved' JVM version.  We got
> hit really hard about a year and a half ago when Sun updated their
> SwingWorker implementation in a minor update which hosed our entire
> application.  I had to go back and use a version from SwingLabs and
> redeploy this to all our clients.  Horrible bug in the Sun version which
> caused a deadlock. I refuse to code anything that requires a client to run
> on a specific minor version.  Though, we do require anything post JDK
> 1.6u10 since there were significant additions that we relied on (Nimbus
> Look & Feel being one of them).
>
> Another issue can be finding people who truly understand Swing. I didn't
> know it when I started. About a year after I wished I had known more before
> I started because I did have some design issues which would have been
> mitigated early if I had understood.  Having a good architectural design
> for your app is key.  It's not as cut-and-dry as a SpringMVC type
> application.  I had been unable to find any really good application
> frameworks to get us started. There are some, but...  So, be prepared to
> design your application model appropriately. Don't keep your business logic
> embedded in your UI code. If you are creating a fat client, build yourself
> an application that doesn't require a UI. If you can build an command line
> type interface in your application I highly recommend it. I built a debug
> console in ours and it has been extremely helpful in inspecting the
> application's state.
>
> One major pain, that I would not do again, is incorporate Groovy into it.
>  Groovy is just to much overhead for a responsive interface. You don't
> notice this on a server-side application, but you will know it when your
> app is just not responding as fast as you would like. Plus, we had a lot of
> memory leak issues with the Groovy scripting engine at the time. We
> incorporated Groovy because we needed to be able to customize some
> interface components at deployment/run-time. We created our own small DSL
> for this, and it was painful.  I think I would now like to try Clojure, but
> that is just 'hey, I'd like to try it'.
>
> Another major annoyance in Swing (or java development in general) is how
> much code you need to write to do simple tasks, such as responding to a
> button click. You will be writing a lot of anonymous inner classes
> (listeners/delegates) which become very cumbersome since there is just so
> much boilerplate in it.  If only I could have had those Lambdas when I
> wrote it!  That would have made Swing dev so much nicer.  I can't even
> explain how nice that would be.
>
> Another small annoyance is the lack of Generics in Swing. Some people say
> it's a bad idea, others want it.  But, just get use to casting or creating
> your own generic table models. But, that only gets you so far.
>
> But, that all aside, I like Swing. I would rather do swing than write a
> JavaScript application. The key is to keep it modular, maintainable and
> testable. Keep that in mind.  Your interfaces should be isolated from each
> other and communicate via observers. Just about every design pattern you
> have ever read is in Swing. It's an awesome way to learn them.
>
> Oh, and always remember that all your UI updates should be done on the
> event-dispatching thread!
>
> SwingUtilities/EventQueue is your friend (when Sun/Oracle doesn't break
> it).
>
> Read the docs on how cell renderers work.
>
> There is a lot more, but it is fun.
>
> --briggs
>
>
> On Dec 16, 2011, at 11:06 AM, Summers Pittman ℝ wrote:
>
> > I've noticed that there are many of us who build web applications
> running Java (in my case a gigantic financial app) or work with companies
> who make Java libraries (in Gunnar's case Spring Source) for use in web
> applications.  I was wondering if anyone was working on client
> applications?  Not web applications but apps which run on the desktop (or
> Android or maybe an Applet) Java applications.
> >
> > What technologies do you use? What problem are you trying to solve?  How
> is it working out?
> >
> > Summers Pittman
> > >>Phone:912 293 2314
> > >>Java is my crack.
> >
> >
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