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21st Century Schizoid App

Posted by editor on October 12, 2006 at 10:32 AM EDT

Where does the web app end and the Swing app begin

It's too easy to get hung up on the "web" part of "web apps" and "web services". So something generates HTML... so what? That doesn't mean you have to throw it as-is into a browser window. After all, HTML is structured data (better still if it's XHTML), and there's no reason that a client can't just pick through that structure (with iteration, XPath, whatever) to pull out the pieces of data it needs, and then use them in whatever way is most apporpriate for the client.

Such as, say, putting that data into a Swing GUI? Take some data from a couple different sources, mix them together and you have a mashup. Or, this being Swing, a smashup.

In the Feature Article, Web Swinging, Richard Bair introduces API's and techniques from the SwingX-WS project to help you load and use HTML and XML data in your rich Swing application. "Working with HTML and XML content in Java rich clients can be very productive. [...] Using XPath and SimpleDocument, you can easily extract data from XML documents and use this data in your Swing applications."

In Java Today, the Java.net Commons project is an effort to provide helper classes, interfaces and implementations to make working in Java simpler, combining various common utilities that have been used in other open source projects including Savant and Verge. Its tools include a type converter library (String to/from Object, String to/from Array, etc.), a type validation library, JavaBean conveniences, and more.

The 261st issue of the NetBeans Weekly Newsletter is out, with features and contests to commemorate NetBeans' eighth birthday, an announcement of NetBeans IDE 5.5 RC 1 and a poll on RC 1, results from the NetBeans debugger survey, a Flash presentation from Roumen Strobl on NetBeans' best features, and much more.

Would-be Ajax creators can get up and running with the article Introducing the Google Web Toolkit. "The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a unique entry among Ajax toolkits in that it is built for Java developers who may not know the latest web coding standards, but want to harness the power of Ajax. Until now, Ajax toolkits or frameworks have consisted of Javascript widget libraries and implementing them involved detailed knowledge of Javascript, HTML and CSS. With GWT's Java-centric approach, much of the pain has been removed with Swing-like creation of the front-end code, real debugging from within your favorite IDE and guaranteed cross-browser support."

Evan Summers considers closures' access to non-final local variables in today's Weblogs, and wonders if that's really what all the fuss is about. His blog Better than Good is "a follow up to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, where i got taught that closures are more than a short-hand notation for anonymous classes, and i explore how this might be useful in Swing EDT related programming."

Vikram Goyal wonders Why are Sun's code examples such bad examples of coding?, and after illustrating some lowlights, surmises that "there is no quality control applied to Sun's code examples."

Inderjeet Singh considers the problem of How to do black-box testing for AJAX Applications? "Web developers are rushing to use AJAX in their Web applications to enhance user-experience. However, testing is a pre-requisite for creating production-quality applications. In this blog, I share my attempts on writing automated blackbox tests for the popular Web 2.0 petstore application."

In today's Forums, sbalmos wonders whether GlassFish's SOAP implementation is too eager, in Lazy fetching useless with SOAP? "This is more of an architectural question... Apparently lazy fetching of an entity's relationships and collections is completely useless with SOAP, because the JAXB XML marshaller touches each of the entity's properties, and thus causing a lazy fetch. I was somewhat hoping that entities with lazy-fetching properties or collections would, somehow, just return the entity IDs of the entity / collection member entities. I have other explicit methods for retrieving those other member entities, given entity IDs. But since every property is touched, it's like everything is eagerly fetched. This can *easily* get out of control in my envisioned system, where hundreds of collection members can have parents that have hundreds of other members, etc etc etc. The classic parent/child tree problem which lazy fetching was supposed to solve."

Joshua Marinacci got an answer about shaped windows, which he reports in the thread Re: Is There A BalloonTip Component In Java?: "I just got a message back from Scott at Apple on the OSX stuff: 'Check out this example code RoundTransparentWindow/index.html. I believe what you're basically doing is creating a clear window that has a view in the shape you want.'"

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Where does the web app end and the Swing app begin?
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