The module does 4 things:

1. Integrates the engine
2. Provides an extension point in its layer file for new voices
3. Provides an options dialog for selecting a voice
4. Provides an API hook for speaking a String in the current voice.  Thus it would be trivial for a NB developer to add an action that says something (e.g. TTS.getDefault().speak("the time is " + getTimeString())  )

It was pretty easy.  I spent most of the evening unraveling the weird manifest and classloader tricks the freeTTS project does.  (IMHO there's no reason for a TTS library to create a classloader.  Ever.)

A few hints to library writers:

1. overloading the Main-Class attribute in your jar's manifest to do anything other than specifying a class with a main() method is a bad idea.
2. If the way you read in your configuration requires a hack to work with webstart, you're making too many assumptions.
3. It's not the library code's job to figure out which classloader a user-supplied extension is in.  It's the users job to add their jar to the classpath.  By trying to do it in the library's source code, you're just ensuring that anyone integrating your library in a way you didn't foresee can't do it.

Seriously, I spent just a few minutes getting FreeTTS to work on the command line, maybe half an hour writing the netbeans code, and several hours figuring out just why the heck the engine wasn't finding any voices when it ran in NetBeans.]]> 2008-01-09T01:02:16Z 2008-01-09T01:02:09Z tag:weblogs.java.net,2008:/blog/richunger/236.8950 2008-01-09T01:02:09Z

There's still some issues with the integration that I've never managed to tackle, relating to heavyweight-lightweight component mixing.  The browser doesn't handle being resized very well, and tends to put itself in front of other TopComponents.  Any ideas welcome!

The source code is available on the java.net project site.

Tags: netbeans, jdic

I leave you guys alone for one little year, and just look what happens!

While I was off gallivanting, NetBeans added a GPL license, switched to mercurial, and released a new version. The JDK also went mercurial on me. Google released their Android platform. Spring, Tapestry, Wicket, and GWT are all in new major releases.

Things sure to move quickly around here. I've got a lot to catch up on.

I'm like a kid in a candy store. I can't wait to play with it all!

Unfortunately, my laptop is broken. Anyone know a good laptop repair shop in the Seattle area?

Well, the first to answer my call was Gustavo Santucho and his girlfriend Guadalupe. They, along with a few other programmer friends, have their own consulting company, based in beautiful Bariloche, Argentina. This is the a city near the fantastic Nahuel Huapi National Park, near the Chilean border.

They picked us up as we arrived by bus, and immediately we discovered that his English was far better than my Spanish :)
I've gotten a little bit better now, since taking some Spanish lessons from a friend of his in Buenos Aires, but most of our conversations at the time were in English.

Looking around the small city, you wouldn't think there'd be much local work for java programmers. It's basically a tourist town, situated on a very large and sleepy lake. However, Gustavo took me for a drive, and on the way he kept pointing to grocery and pharmacy chain stores, saying "they're a client, they're a client". They also have a significant percentage of clients from overseas. They gain most new clients by word of mouth, and in fact, they're getting more work than they can handle right now, and are thinking about ways to expand the company.

Gustavo tells me that the trend in his part of South America is away from webapps and towards RCP-based software, which is why they started using the NetBeans platform. I was particularly pleased to see them using my JDIC-NetBeans integration on one of their apps.

Guadalupe is the real UI designer in the group. She just emailed me some screenshots for a big new project they have, working for the local electric company:

As you can see, they're integrating components from the NetBeans Graph Visualization library (graph.netbeans.org) and Geotools.

Gustavo and Guadalupe were extremely hospitable, and we had a fantastic time. If you're interested in reading about the more vacation-like aspects of our time together, check out my personal blog.

Well, we're off to the airport soon. We're about to fly to Athens and make our way all the way around Europe (clockwise). Caio!

If you're interested in tracking my progress, regular updates will be in my personal blog.

I'm just posting now because I recently procured the tickets for the first half of my journey. My dates are not set yet, but the cities are. My general itinerary starts with a flight to Buenos Aires on March 12th. I'll be in Argentina and Chile for 5 weeks. Then, it's on to Athens and Crete. From Greece, I'll be going to Italy, Croatia, France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Amsterdam, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, and India (Mumbai, Rajasthan, and Delhi). From there, the itinerary is not set, but it is likely to include Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Beyond that, we've not decided.

We're looking to meet people who want to show us a bit of their home country, and maybe put us up on their couches as payment for an appearance at your local JUG or company forum :)

A few folks commented on my last post (specifically from South Africa and Italy). I'm sorry I didn't include better contact info in my last post. Blog comments leave me no way to get in touch with you, so I'll try this again: rich (dot) unger (at) gmail.

For one thing, I've been collaborating on the forthcoming NetBeans RCP book. If you're at all interested in RCP development, I promise you this book will make your job easier. I started on the NB platform about 3 or 4 years ago, and I struggled with it a lot. I can't believe how much easier it is now. The support in the IDE for writing platform-based apps is better (thanks largely to Jesse Glick), the information on platform.netbeans.org is much, much better (thanks largely to Geertjan), and this book is going to be the icing on the cake.

And, while I was writing that chapter, I also gave notice at Nuance. After 6+ years at the speech recognition giant, I'm calling it quits. I'd like to stress that there were no hard feelings or anything particularly negative at Nuance that made me feel I had to leave. My experience at Nuance has been tremendous. Right out of college, I was fortunate to work in an exciting and technically challenging software field (speech recognition) with a lot of really, really smart programmers and linguists. Everything I learned about developing large, high-quality software products I learned at Nuance. I grew a lot there, both professionally and personally.

I was just ready to take a break, and soon I'll be looking for new challenges. But first...

My girlfriend gave notice at her job as well. We've decided to travel the world together for about a year. We're going to South America, Europe, and Africa. Everything after that we haven't planned out yet, but it's likely to include parts of India, China, southeast Asia, possibly Japan, Australia/NZ, or some islands in the south pacific. I'll be posting all about this on my new personal blog.

As part of this grand adventure, I'm attempting an experiment. I figure, if Sun, with their millions spent on marketing and travel, can have a "NetBeans World Tour", why can't I?

The lonely planet books all say that the best way to travel to foreign countries is to engage with locals in a more substantive way than just interacting with hotel clerks and waiters. Have conversations with people who are not paid to have conversations with you (i.e. people in the tourism industry).

In my opinion, one way to do this is to meet people with similar interests. Like, maybe Java.

I've spoken twice at JavaOne and once at OOPSLA on the subject of NetBeans RCP development. I've also got fodder for talks from my experience at Nuance doing speech recognition with java in general, and NetBeans RCP in particular, as well as the material I've contributed to the new book.

Also, while not specifically Java-related, my girlfriend and travel companion Patty is an expert (and has spoken at conferences) on advances in telecommunications infrastructure, particularly in the realm of FTTP.

So here's my idea: we'll have several slide decks on USB keys with us. If you have a JUG or other organization somewhere on our itinerary, and you'd like one or both of us to come and speak, we'd be happy to, in exchange for space on your couch or in your guest room for the night, and maybe some company to help us explore your home country. Show us your favorite museum, pub, hiking trail, or landmark.

In a nutshell, we're trading expertise for experiences.

Here's an example:

I went to citibank's credit card site, because I have a cashback card with them and I want to get a refund check. Unfortunately, they have a limit of $300 per year that you can get, and if you've used their card enough to earn more than that, you aren't allowed to get any check at all through the website. Instead, you get the error message:

We are unable to process your request at this time. Either your total accumulated cash back rebate balance does not qualify for a check, or your request cannot be completed online. If you have any questions, please call the Cash Back Redemption Line at ^=dividendRedemptionNumber^

First of all, there's a lazy, but intentional limitation that forces me to waste my time and the time of one of their phone agents to issue a check that the website should be perfectly capable of doing. Secondly, they can't even tell me the phone number because of a simple coding error that didn't get caught in their QA cycle.

So, I took care of my business over the phone (by calling the number on the back of my credit card), and then I sent them a message through their "Contact Us" link:

When I attempt to redeem a reward, and my reward balance is over $300, I get: We are unable to process your request at this time. Either your total accumulated cash back rebate balance does not qualify for a check, or your request cannot be completed online. If you have any questions, please call the Cash Back Redemption Line at ^=dividendRedemptionNumber^.

I can't dial ^=dividendRedemptionNumber^ :)

Here I am, just trying to make it easier on the next guy, and save Citibank a little money in their call center.

The reply was quick and polite, and clearly done by a human. These are all good traits of a customer service organization. However, they get it spectacularly wrong:

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Thank you for using our website.

Somehow, I doubt the bug report got filed in their internal issue tracker for the website developers.

I would have posted this to a java.net discussion forum, but the natural one (called "How do I?", located at https://java-net.dev.java.net/servlets/ForumMessageList?forumID=95) seems completely overrun by newbies asking all manner of general java coding questions. Methinks the forum descriptions are not sufficiently clear :)

I really like the "Fast Open" selector that you get from the "Navigate...Go To Class" menu item. I looked at the code, and was dismayed to see that it was hard-coded for opening classes, and was not reusable for just selecting a class for another purpose (such as inserting a class reference in an xml file).

So, I sat down to write such a widget, and was pleased to be able to put something pretty featureful together in a couple of hours. I use the MDR API for querying classes.

The list box contains all classes whose classname (without package) starts with the substring in the text field. The list selection is the value returned by the dialog.

Here's a little tour of the code:

public class ClassSelector extends javax.swing.JDialog
{
    // the data for the ListModel
    private List candidates = new ArrayList();

    // an example usage
    public static String getFullyQualifiedClassName()
    {
        ClassSelector cs = new ClassSelector();
        cs.setVisible(true);
        JCClass c = cs.getSelection();
        return c == null ? null : c.getFullName();
    }

    public ClassSelector()
    {
        this(WindowManager.getDefault().getMainWindow(), true);
    }

    public ClassSelector(java.awt.Frame parent, boolean modal)
    {
        super(parent, modal);
        initComponents();
    }

    public JCClass getSelection()
    {
        return (JCClass)matchingList.getSelectedValue();
    }

    private void initComponents()
    {
        // matisse-generated code here
    }

    private void matchingListKeyPressed(java.awt.event.KeyEvent evt)
    {
        // make ENTER work the same as the OK button
        if (evt.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_ENTER)
            okButtonActionPerformed(null);
    }

    private void cancelButtonActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt)
    {
        matchingList.setSelectedIndex(-1);
        dispose();
    }

    private void okButtonActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt)
    {
        dispose();
    }

    private ListModel createListModel()
    {
        return new Model();
    }

    private ListCellRenderer createCellRenderer()
    {
        return new Renderer();
    }

    private class Model extends KeyAdapter implements ListModel
    {
        private List listeners = new ArrayList();

        public Model()
        {
            classNameField.addKeyListener(this);
        }

        public int getSize()
        {
            return candidates.size();
        }

        public Object getElementAt(int index)
        {
            return candidates.get(index);
        }

        public void addListDataListener(ListDataListener l)
        {
            listeners.add(l);
        }

        public void removeListDataListener(ListDataListener l)
        {
            listeners.remove(l);
        }

        private void fireListChange()
        {
            ListDataEvent evt = new ListDataEvent(this,
                    ListDataEvent.CONTENTS_CHANGED, 0, getSize()-1);
            for (ListDataListener l : listeners)
            {
                l.contentsChanged(evt);
            }
        }

        private void refresh()
        {
            String str = classNameField.getText();

            if (str == null || str.trim().length() == 0)
            {
                // text field is blank, so don't do a query
                if (!candidates.isEmpty())
                {
                    candidates.clear();
                    fireListChange();
                }
            }
            else
            {
                // clear out the old query results, and do a new query
                str = str.trim();
                candidates.clear();

                JCFinder finder = JCFinderFactory.getDefault().getGlobalFinder();

                // TODO: make case insensitive
                List classes = finder.findClasses(
                        null, // don't specify a package
                        str, 
                        false); // don't require an exact match

                candidates.addAll(classes);

                fireListChange();

                if (!candidates.isEmpty() && matchingList.getSelectedIndex() == -1)
                {
                    // if there's no selection at this point, select the first item
                    matchingList.setSelectedIndex(0);
                }

            }
        }

        /** each time a letter is typed, do a new query */
        public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e)
        {
            refresh();
        }
    }

    private class Renderer implements ListCellRenderer
    {
        public Component getListCellRendererComponent(
                JList list, Object value, int index,
                boolean isSelected, boolean cellHasFocus)
        {
            JCClass c = (JCClass)value;
            String str = c.getName() + " (" + c.getPackageName() + ")";
            JLabel label = new JLabel(str);
            if (isSelected)
            {
                label.setBackground(Color.BLUE);
                label.setForeground(Color.WHITE);
                label.setOpaque(true);
            }
            return label;
        }
    }

    // Variables declaration - do not modify//GEN-BEGIN:variables
    private javax.swing.JButton cancelButton;
    private javax.swing.JTextField classNameField;
    private javax.swing.JLabel jLabel1;
    private javax.swing.JLabel jLabel2;
    private javax.swing.JScrollPane jScrollPane1;
    private javax.swing.JList matchingList;
    private javax.swing.JButton okButton;
    // End of variables declaration//GEN-END:variables

}

Neat, eh? The full code is here.]]>