Re: [Tockit-general] Docco-0.3

[Peter B. <pe...@pe...>]

"start" should be the program executed by the command line interpreter 
(which I think is 16bit). The long file names might be a problem, but 
don't have to be -- it all depends on the "start" command. At the moment 
I can't do much but guessing, it seems that the code we use does work 
for other people and since I don't have access to any DOS-based Windows 
I can't test myself. You'll probably have to live with that problem, 
unless I get some inspiration or someone else has an idea or is willing 
to write a little C/C++ tool with JNI wrapper that does the trick. It 
would just call some WinAPI function (I know the is one, but I am not 
sure about the name, could be ShellExecute), but it would need the 
proper setup to create such a thing, which I don't have at the moment. 
The most tricky bit would probably be loading it on Windows and only on 
Windows.

Another thing I might do is supporting drag&drop as well as copy&paste. 
The former would allow dragging the file URLs into other programs, the 
latter could e.g. be used to copy the ULR into Windows Explorer, which 
might cause the shell execute. Similar with the Run-Dialog (Win+R). No 
timeframe for this, though.

  Peter


Bobby wrote:

> Non of those commands work. As you may know, Windows doesn't have a 
> terminal program. I think command.com is still a 16 bit DOS 
> interpreter. It doesn't recognize long filenames, and I'm pretty sure 
> there are no file associations. In other words, you can only use 
> 'command' with an executable.
>
> In Windows I do have the file association set correctly so that if I 
> click on a file in my file browser, it opens in the application. I 
> just verified that with html and pdf.
>
> What time is it there?
>
> Bobby
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Peter Becker wrote:
>
>> Bobby wrote:
>>
>>> Peter,
>>>
>>> I clicked on the link and the file loaded in my browser bypassing my 
>>> download manager. I found your index page and the same thing 
>>> happened there. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it but I used 
>>> the "save as" option and overwrote the existing file. I was affraid  
>>> that might corrupt the file, but maybe not. I'm running Mozilla 
>>> Firebird.
>>
>>
>> "Save as..." should be ok. Mozilla tends to do that with certain 
>> files, I think it relies too much on the server configuration and 
>> ours probably doesn't know .jars are binary.
>>
>>>
>>> I don't see any difference when the program launches, and when I 
>>> click on a file, it's the same as before, a DOS window opens with no 
>>> content then closes.
>>
>>
>> Can you try to open a command line window and run some of these 
>> commands on one of the files you want to open (FILE = path to file, 
>> in quotes if necessary):
>>
>>  command /c start "" FILE
>>  command /c start FILE
>>  start FILE
>>
>> Which of these command do work for you?
>>
>>>
>>> I have the Jave Development kit (j2sdk1.4.1_02). I don't have much 
>>> experience, but I'm really interested in it, and I'd be happy to 
>>> tinker with it if you think there might be something I could do.
>>>
>>> My only programming experience is with Quickbasic. I bought it just 
>>> before they announced Visual Basic. I've studied C and C++, and have 
>>> Borlands free command line tools, and Dev-CPP IDE. In addition, I 
>>> have eclipse sdk 2.1 which seems really top heavy to me. Also the 
>>> Fox Tool Kit.
>>>
>>> I have collected all this software to try to figure out what I want 
>>> to put my time into, so I don't repeat the QB experience.
>>>
>>> As you might surmise, I get along without programming, but as an 
>>> practicing electrical engineer, it sure is handy at times.
>>
>>
>> If you really want to go into Java development I'd recommend using a 
>> full IDE -- you definitely want method expansion, the refactoring 
>> facilities and other goodies. Eclipse is pretty good (I use 3.0M8 at 
>> the moment, the milestones are usually stable), IDEA is better but 
>> not for free. Some hints on how to get/use ToscanaJ code (which Docco 
>> is based upon) can be found here:
>>
>>  http://toscanaj.sourceforge.net/participate/index.html
>>
>> If you want I can do a writeup of an Eclipse configuration. I had 
>> that plan for a while.
>>
>> If you just want a simple and easy to use language I'd recomment 
>> going Python (http://python.org/). Java is powerful, but messy (esp. 
>> some of the libraries are badly designed). Python is very neat and 
>> since it is mainly a scripting language easy to get used to -- you 
>> can always test things in the scripting enviroment.
>>
>> HTH,
>>   Peter
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Bobby
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
>>>
>>>
>>> Peter Becker wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Bobby,
>>>>
>>>> Bobby wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thank you for this neat program! I have been researching the best 
>>>>> method of implementing this kind of application, but it looks like 
>>>>> I no longer need to worry about that. My last idea was to adapt a 
>>>>> web crawler to a local application.
>>>>>
>>>>> Docco does just about everything I need. I collect news and other 
>>>>> information for use in my own work as a writer and publisher of a 
>>>>> website. I need to access a large amount of this form of data, way 
>>>>> beyond the capability of any file browser, and yet that's all I 
>>>>> could find until now.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the praise :-)
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I downloaded the program and the two available plugins (pdfbox and 
>>>>> poi). I had the .bat extension associated with my text editor 
>>>>> (Crimson), so when I tried to run it, it just opened instead in 
>>>>> the editor. Once I fixed that, the program launched and ran as 
>>>>> advertised.
>>>>>
>>>>> However I do have one small problem that you may be able to offer 
>>>>> some advice on. When I try to open a file from the tree list, I 
>>>>> get a DOS window which immediately closes, and the expected 
>>>>> application never opens at all.
>>>>>
>>>>> The directory I indexed contains mostly .html with some .pdf 
>>>>> however, in the tree list, all files have the same Windows default 
>>>>> icon, which might be the best clue. For some reason, the file type 
>>>>> isn't being recognized.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm still running Windows 98SE which is likely the real problem. 
>>>>> I've been trying to migrate to Linux but haven't succeeded yet.
>>>>>
>>>>> Do you have anything to offer on this?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I just browsed for some information on this. We use a little Java 
>>>> class called Browserlauncher, which does not seem to be maintained 
>>>> anymore. But some people reported that problem you describe on 
>>>> Win9x/ME in the bug tracker (it is a project on Sourceforge). I 
>>>> tried to apply that patch but since I long left DOS-based Windows, 
>>>> I can't test it.
>>>>
>>>> Can you download this:
>>>>  http://kvo.itee.uq.edu.au/~pbecker/ToscanaJ.jar
>>>>
>>>> and replace the ToscanaJ.jar in Docco's libs with that? Does that 
>>>> help?
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Perhaps an idea for further development, would be a small 
>>>>> "thumbnail" like viewer that would show the first paragraph for 
>>>>> example, as you select a document from the tree. Or, alternatively 
>>>>> a scrollable list of such sampled text from the documents in the 
>>>>> tree list. Locating a particular document in this way would be 
>>>>> much faster than loading each document one by one into an 
>>>>> application.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> We can think about that. It implies either storing this information 
>>>> in the index (which normally does store which words are contained 
>>>> in a document, but not their order) or re-reading the document 
>>>> again. But that wouldn't be too hard and I agree that this could be 
>>>> a handy little feature.
>>>>
>>>>  Peter
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>
>>