Hi all,
After rather a long interval, the new release of Uncle Unc has been posted. There's further work on the move towards a decorator-based approach (the ulu.view.Shaper interface), with filesystems (and zip/jar archives) now completed. There are various new utility classes too, mostly in anticipation of developing a proper luggable module structure.
During the long delay since February, the first Uncle Unc-based application has been released, with much of my energy taken up with testing and deploying that. I encountered the IzPack installer - http://www.izforge.net/izpack - along the way, and its made my life much easier too. Would there be any interest in an installer for Unc?
Anyway, the application in question is a system dynamics simulator for environmental policy-makers, at http://www.eccosim.org.uk. It's been a useful exercise pushing this in front of non-techies, and I think on the whole its validated my belief that the file-explorer-everything-is-an-object approach works fairly well.
In the lull, I've also been doing some documentation, javadoc quality is improving, and I've revamped the website, which should go live in the next week or so.
I also developed a separate application called 'ShowMan', which runs an XML and python based script in order to do live demonstrations of coding. There's a demo of this in the latest Unc download ('java ulu.show.ShowMan file:///path/to/unc/scripts/show/whatisunc.xml'), but the technology is equally applicable to showing off any java project.
Unc has been crawling along as my pet project for over a year now, and there's still some work to do before it's core API is stable enough to take submissions on third-party modules without breaking them every time, but it's strong enough to embed into real applications now (e.g. my simulator). I'm currently developing a few javabeans that leverage Unc, allowing developers to drop file viewers, log viewers, object inspectors etc. into their apps from their favourite dev tool.
All the best,
Dave
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