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
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