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 Editor's Daily BlogMoondancePosted by invalidname on April 05, 2006 at 10:16 AM | Comments (3)Why can't Java talk to my Dance Pad? OK, someone please stop me from having to write this as a native Mac app... I'm working on some stuff for the Distributing the Future podcast, and I have some phone and Skype interviews that I'd like to transcribe before I write my script and plan my edits. When I worked at CNN, I'd occasionally be assigned tape logging duty, which meant I'd spend the day throwing tapes into a deck and transcribing them. To go fast, a logger needs to keep his or her hands on the keyboard, instead of reaching up for the jog wheel. So the tape deck had foot pedals which could run the tape forward or backwards, allowing you to control the deck with your feet while you kept your hands in a typing position. I'm in pretty much the same situation, except that the motion I want to eliminate is mousing over to the audio's scrubber bar to go backwards and forwards. I want to create a GUI that has an audio scrubber (from QuickTime for Java and/or JMF [to support Linux, which can't run QTJ]) at the top, then a line for the current media time, then a big text area to type into. A hot key will copy the media time into the text area, so you can easily log when specific sound bites occur. The key is being able to control the media scrubber with my feet. You'd think that the lack of foot control hardware would be the blocker, but... I have several Dance Dance Revolution dance pad controllers, and a PlayStation-to-USB adapter that works with StepMania. It may sound crazy, but Microsoft is already experimenting with just such an input method. So, with a little experimentation, I should be able to map the arrows to some sensible actions (play, rewind, stop, go back 5 sec., etc.), convert those into corresponding method calls on the audio, shove the pad under my desk, and start logging. As it turns out, the blocker is not the existence of hardware, but rather seeing the dance pad from Java. I tried JInput, with some guidance from Chapter 28 of Java Programming Techniques for Games, but the Mac version of JInput seems to be a total no-op. Running the So... it's looking like if I'm even going to write this at all, I have to go native. Or write it in Java and not have it run on my own machine, which is kind of pointless. It's a shame, because this seems like it would be a curiously practical app for what I need to do. Anyways, sort of a whiny blog today, sorry about that. If you know of any working Mac implementations of JInput or JSR-80, I hope you'll post a link in the talkbacks. Thanks. In Also in Java Today, following up on recent attempts to define software architecture and clarify its value, Artima's Bill Venners writes that Software Architecture is Leadership: "I think one of the most important ways to think about architecture is that it is an opportunity to provide leadership. The architecture embodies the decisions of the architects, the leaders, on how things should be done in the project. The architecture should make it easy for people working on the project to do things the right way: the way the architects believe things should be done. In other words, instead of just saying that things should be done a certain way, the architects should design architectural systems and structures that guide the team down that path." After two excerpts that exposed the Java APIs to the Zeroconf/Bonjour/Rendezvous API, ONJava wraps its look at Stuart Cheshire and Daniel H. Steinberg's Zero Configuration Networking: The Definitive Guide with a thorough code example. Zero Configuration Networking: Using the Java APIs, Part 3 features a self-networking tic-tac-toe game, in which each client advertises itself to the network and discovers potential opponents. Look past the details of the Xs and Os and this could be the foundation of any Zeroconf-enabled game or other network application, written in Java. Ethan Nicholas proposes a Java 2 Browser Edition in today's Weblogs: "Java isn't usually considered to be a serious alternative to rich client technologies like Ajax and Flex. And that's a shame, because it is by far the most powerful of them. What would it take for Java to become a serious contender?" Kito D. Mann runs some interesting numbers in Job Stats, Indeed: "Since I'm pretty heavily immersed in the world of Java web frameworks, I had to run the following query: ((jsf and java) or "javaserver faces"), ruby on rails, tapestry and java, webwork" In Headless toolkit basics, Artem Ananiev offers "A short overview of a special AWT toolkit called 'headless toolkit' which can be used in a system with display and/or mouse and keyboard missing." In Projects and Communities, the article Using Java DB in Desktop Applications describes how to download, install, integrate, and deploy Java DB within desktop Java technology applications. A demo application called Address Book demonstrates how to work with Java DB as an embedded database. The Javapedia entry for SIP collects items of interest to developers working with the Session Initiation Protocol, including feature articles, open-source projects, and related JSR's. As with all Javapedia pages, you can click the "edit" link to add your own resources to the page.
In today's Forums,
Answering the question Which lossless JAI supported image format would be the fastest to load pixels from if the destination images requested are of random size and scaling?, the post Re: [JAI] Optimal speed image storage format says: "Look into the Raw format. It may be counterintuitive but if there's a lot of random accessing to be done, an uncompressed, raw format can be faster than dealing with compressed data, despite the added disk I/O time. A lot easier too." In today's java.net News Headlines :
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