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Go ask Alice

Posted by daniel on November 9, 2004 at 11:28 AM EST

Taking a trip through the Looking Glass

Sam Hiser co-wrote a book on the Java Desktop System for O'Reilly and was particularly impressed with the look and feel of Project Looking Glass. For him, it was one of the first real significant breaks with the traditional WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing Device) approach. In Through the Looking Glass he interviews Looking Glass creator Hideya Kawahara about the ideas behind the interface and explores whether or not Looking Glass just eye candy or is there something deep and real going on.

Kathy Walrath has done a lot for java.net in the past year and a half with all that she has done for the Java Desktop Community. In today's Weblogs she debuts as a blogger with a reminder: Don't miss the Swing chat!

In Also in Java Today , The latest issue of the Journal of Object Technology includes an article on Mixins and the Superclass Interface. Anthony J H Simmons writes that "A mixin is best described as a freestanding component extension, something that is intended to be added onto another class using the inheritance mechanism. A mixin can be combined with many different base classes, to yield different extended classes which contain the combined base and mixin features. Some mixins provide orthogonal functionality that can be added to any class. Other mixins expect the class with which they are combined to provide certain operations, because the mixin's own methods depend on them."

John Zukowski introduces you to the latest look and feel added to J2SE 5.0 in Getting to know Synth. Synth "allows you to change the look produced by the program without reprogramming. The format of the XML file used with Synth is described in the Synth File Format document. Inside the outermost synth tag, you can have tags such as <style>, <bind>, <font>, <color>, <imagePainter>, and <imageIcon>. There are also special properties that you can set, these are listed in the Component Specific Properties document. Essentially, you define styles and bind them to components."

In Projects and Communities the Java Enterprise community's Stapler project "is a library that staples your application objects to URLs in the web tier, making it easier to write web applications. The core idea of Stapler is to automatically assign URLs for your application objects."

The Jini community's compute server framework provided by the ComputeFarm has been improved with a new release that features a complete overhaul of the API, a production mode switch, and more unit tests, documentation, and samples.

Cowwoc invites you to take a look at Joda Time in today's Forums. He writes that "Joda Time [..] seems to provide a rich and extensive replacement for Date and Calendar and replacing those two is certainly well-warranted. What do you guys think? Feedback wanted".

KCPeppe advises that "Exposing a collection in an API is just exposing yourself for down stream problems. Not encapsulating collections in a class that provides symantics that is consistant with the domain is also exposing yourself for potential problems later on."

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Taking a trip through the Looking Glass
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