java-gnome-developer

[Java-gnome-developer] Hello ... and thank you !

[Charles-H. d'A. <cda...@gm...>]

Hello every body !

This a not so short mail to introduce myself on this mailing list and
to say thank you for your amazing work.

I am Charles-Henri d'Adhemar from France (Nice) but people often call me chicha.
I am a developer working in IT technologies in the travel industry.
I have been participating in some Free Software projects more or less
actively depending on my life evolution (student with lots of time to
family man with very few time).

I have been looking for a nice toolkit for hacking around at home when
time permit and I found GTK a really nice one as well as the wide GTK
community (Gnome, XFCE ...).

Then I have been looking for a nice and fun programming language. At
work we use a lot C/C++. I have to say that I do not like this
language : too much traps even for experienced developers, not enough
nice and homogeneous integrated libraries. Fortunately I had the
opportunity to discover and use Java at work and I love it.

However at the beginning I started to hack with GTK and Perl, then
C#/Mono, then Python ... until I read a message from one of you on the
gnome planet about java-gnome.
I liked Perl, C#/Mono and Python. There are all great Free Software
and open communities. But what you are doing here at java-gnome is
awesome !!!


What I like a lot :

- Your website : simple and useful.

- Your documentation and examples : Seeing developers taking the time
to write good api and examples is a sign that their work is really
good because they put their "clients" (application developers) at the
center of the development process. Wen you read the documentation you
feel like the developers really wanted to please their users instead
of taking some good time for themselves first.

- Your bindings : it really integrates well with Java. Also I am
always amazed by all the good GTK bindings around the world. I am not
enough experienced to say it is better than others but I just think
you succeeded in integrating well with Java.


What I do not like  :

- Your communication : Mono guys make a lot of buzz around various
planets (which I think is too much), and applications made using Mono
also make a lot of noise (banshee is one of them). We all know Novell
is behind this. But I think java-gnome deserves to be known more !
However I think that what is going on on the java side and the facts
it is becoming completely Open and Free software will bring you more
users and a great future, as well as the great quality of your work !

Here is an example to illustrate this point : I do not know of a
single application made using java-gnome, and I cannot find a list of
those on the website.


My questions :

- You are using a home made build system, "Equivalence" and you plan
to use a new one, "Fabricate" : it is hard to Google with such names
;-) Are those projects mature enough for usage outside java-gnome ? I
would like to make people build my software using ./configure make
install (to be independent from eclipse) but I do not want to use
autotools ...


- I use Mandriva 2009.0 as my GNU/Linux Distribution. Unfortunatly
they packaged the old and deprecated bindings.
I made a rpm spec file to build java-gnome and have it packaged. The
only thing which is not right is that I have to hardcode the path to
the jdk on the ./configure line because it is not detected.
I will be please to help and package the new java-gnome for Mandriva
:-) Any recommendation before I start looking at java-gnome's
configure script to support Mandriva and submit the patch ?

Congratulations, and thank you very much to all of you !
Chicha.

Re: [Java-gnome-developer] Hello ... and thank you !

[Andrew C. <an...@op...>]

On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 10:31 +0100, Charles-Henri d'Adhémar wrote:
> I am Charles-Henri d'Adhemar from Nice

Salut Charles-Henri.

> I do not know of a
> single application made using java-gnome,

For various reasons, the Java bindings have long been used by people for
in-house projects. I have seen quite a number of non-trivial apps that
have been written using java-gnome.

The re-engineered java-gnome 4.0 is a young library that has only
recently reached maturity. It takes an equally long time to develop a
serious application to the point where it is complete and worthy of use
by end-users.

I do know of a number of people working on interesting projects, and so
perhaps in the next year or two we will see some significant works
gaining noteriety.

Until then, if people experiment, learn, and then decide to take what
they've learned and invest it in a new project without having "finished"
the old one, that's fine by me. I know their invested effort will pay
off for them - and for all of us - in due course.

I don't lose too much sleep comparing what we do here to other
languages. Some of those bindings have been around for well over a
decade; others have 10s of people being paid full time to work on them.
{shrug} good for them.

What matters is the quality of the work we do and then using that work
to accomplish things that are significant for us as individual
contributors. java-gnome as at 4.0.9 is something I'm very proud of.
There's almost nothing in the library that I, or people whom I've come
to trust, haven't actually *used* to develop *something* with, one way
or another. As I've said elsewhere, java-gnome now does almost
everything I could possibly want it to; there are a still many areas
that I'd like to see coverage for yet, but I have virtually everything I
need to get back to work on the things I put on hold two years ago.

So I'm actually developing again, and THAT has been great fun. I'm in
the same boat as everyone else: lots of works-in-progress which may - or
may not - ever see the light of day as popular public projects.

++

But since you asked, I can point you at one tiny app that I wrote:
http://research.operationaldynamics.com/projects/slashtime/

Barely above trivial it may be, but it has the virtue of a long history
and actually being "complete". [The only thing it's not is an applet,
but that's a topic for another day] It's packaged on Gentoo, and I've
seen it run fine on Debian and Ubuntu, among others.

Serkan Kaba and I recently did the work to internationalize the
Slashtime; it has fr_CA and tr_TR translations now.

I released that work as version 0.5.9 today, in fact. Maybe it's time I
blogged about it.

++

> ... home made build system, "Equivalence" ...  but I do not want to use
> autotools ...

I'll respond about that separately, but long story short, I
*desparately* want to get my attention back to working on Equivalence so
that it's nice and usable for everyone - including me! - for other
projects.

It actually started life for another codebase, back when it was *really*
hard to find Java on a Linux box; java-gnome 4.0 was about the 6th
project to use it. But copying and pasting it around is, of course,
rediculous. As I said, it's something I've been meaning to refactor for
a long time.

I've been a bit distracted by, well, working on java-gnome :)

++

> - I use Mandriva 2009.0 

java-gnome should build find on Mandriva... 

> only thing which is not right is that I have to hardcode the path to
> the jdk on the ./configure line because it is not detected.

If Mandriva actually have a reliable way to locate and identify an
installed JVM and tool suite (ie, its location is a matter of Policy)
feel free to make the changes and submit a branch (java-gnome-hackers
will be a good list to discuss such things if you wish; patches can be
sent there or to me direct). I *do* appolgize for the unweildy size
of ./configure as it stands right now, but it does embody a great deal
of knowledge and that's what matters for the moment. Oh yeah, and it
works :)

Until then, really, there's actually no harm in a distro package
specifying jdk= to ./configure. Sure, it's nice when it's just picked up
automatically, and that's what we aim for (makes developers' and
hackers' lives better) but if not, well, that's what that the override
is there for.

AfC
Sydney

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie

Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy
focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems
review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling
successful deployment of mission critical information technology in
enterprises, worldwide.

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/

Sydney   New York   Toronto   London

Re: [Java-gnome-developer] Hello ... and thank you !

[Charles-H. d'A. <cda...@gm...>]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you very much for your answer.

> ...
> So I'm actually developing again, and THAT has been great fun. I'm in
> the same boat as everyone else: lots of works-in-progress which may - or
> may not - ever see the light of day as popular public projects.
> ...

I hope you did not misunderstood my message. The main purpose was to
congratulate and thanks the developers of java-gnome, not to point out
that there are not many popular application using it.
I am totally aware that java-gnome 4.0 is a recent project and I have
no doubt, as mentioned, that in a short term there will be plenty of
great applications java-gnome based.


> java-gnome should build find on Mandriva...

Indeed it does and making a rpm spec file for it was really easy.


> If Mandriva actually have a reliable way to locate and identify an
> installed JVM and tool suite (ie, its location is a matter of Policy)
> feel free to make the changes and submit a branch (java-gnome-hackers
> will be a good list to discuss such things if you wish; patches can be
> sent there or to me direct). I *do* appolgize for the unweildy size
> of ./configure as it stands right now, but it does embody a great deal
> of knowledge and that's what matters for the moment. Oh yeah, and it
> works :)
>
> Until then, really, there's actually no harm in a distro package
> specifying jdk= to ./configure. Sure, it's nice when it's just picked up
> automatically, and that's what we aim for (makes developers' and
> hackers' lives better) but if not, well, that's what that the override
> is there for.

I will investigate and contact Mandriva's developers to have more
information about how to locate installed JVM and JDK.
Be sure I will submit a patch for this as soon as I found out more on
this subject.

Cheers,
Chicha.