04 Jun 2005
I’m not a NetBeans user but after seeing this demo I may be forced to re-consider that choice. It sounds like this functionality will be included in the next release of the IDE, with a preview development version coming out at or around the time of JavaOne.
I’ve never really used any of the currently available GUI designers for Java. My current process for developing GUI forms involves the JGoodies form layout manager with a few abstractions to reduce the writing of tedious definitions. It has worked fairly well but I would see value in having a graphic layout tool that could generate easily maintained code. Matisse and the NetBeans GUI Builder are definitely on my radar.
Easy GUI Design?
*Developing a graphical user interface (GUI) used to be a tricky part of Java programming. Developers old and new to Swing often spend countless frustrating hours poring over layout code. Even with the help of advanced GUI builders such as the NetBeans IDE 4.1 Form Editor, designing professional-looking, cross- platform GUIs can be a tedious and error-prone task.
The Matisse project solves the core problem of Java GUI creation by making the layout design of visual forms much easier. The project extends the current NetBeans IDE 4.1 Form Editor to support a brand new “Free Design” paradigm that exposes simple layout rules that are easy to understand and use quickly. It lets you lay out components freely, providing visual guidelines for optimal spacing between components and alignment of components. Matisse infers the appropriate resizing behavior — and more, freeing the developer from the complexities of Swing layout managers. The developer just uses an intuitive visual form builder to produce a professional GUI easily and in the background Matisse produces the correct implementation using a layout manager and other Swing constructs.
03 Jun 2005
Google has launched an experiment designed to speed the flow of Web site information to the search giant’s index.
Sitemaps, which is currently in beta, calls for Web administrators to place a Sitemaps-formatted file on their Web servers. This allows the Google crawlers to see which pages are present on a site and which have been changed.
c|net also has an article that talks briefly about it at a high level.
A slashdot reader had this to say “Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites’ content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap. More information on the protocol is available in an FAQ. What’s most interesting is that Google is licensing the idea under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. According to the Google Blog, this is being done ‘…so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).’ They even offer an open source client in Python.”
I’ve been trying to get into the google sitemaps site with little success. I imagine it’s being hit fairly hard right now and is timing out on 9/10 attempts. If I can ever get in I wouldn’t mind trying it out on one of my domains but its unclear what benefit I would get. I imagine the site would be better indexed which is always good. Google says up front that its not going to improve your page ranking.
If this takes off, it would be useful to have a sitemap generation tool built into the blogging engines (wordpress, movabletype, etc.).
02 Jun 2005
I’ll start off this post by saying kudo’s to Microsoft for the announcement that * for the first time the default file format (I’m assuming in Office 12) will be open and accessible by anyone*. I haven’t yet had time to watch the video but I’ll do that tonight. There is a lot more information on the new open data formats at Channel9 (including a video). Brian Jones has also starting blogging and has more information regarding the formats there (including links to a couple whitepapers).
This is very important to all end users, developers and mom/pop’s alike. It’s also equally important that Microsoft isn’t going to force you to upgrade to take advantage of the new format, they’ll be providing patches for 2000, 2003 and XP. There will be varying levels of support for the format (ie. With the new open formats, embedded ole objects will be stored as an embedded xml structure within the enclosing xml file, while in backports, embedded ole objects will be stored as binary in closing file). The embedding of xml structures is a fairly nice aspect as it could allow users to make changes any aspect of a document (including the sub-components) independent of using Office. Icing on the cake is the document compression which looks to result in a reduction of file sizes compared with previous binary formats.
Scoble, any idea if these viewers will get updated to support the new xml format(s)?
I’d like to relate this to a problem we’re facing in my line of work (that is, developing scientific data management tools for Labs). Our customers have made significant capital investments in instruments that to date (and for the foreseeable future) only output proprietary data formats. It’s a bit worse than the Microsoft situation, because there are multiple binary data formats (storing vast amounts of data) with each vendor providing software that only allows viewing of their own format. Each instruments is effectively treated as an independent data silo. Times are changing and there has been a movement at various institutions and standards organizations to develop an open xml-based format and analysis tools that will work on this open format. End-users are beginning to understand the benefits of the open format and what it allows them to do (ie. better downstream analysis of data across a variety of commercial and open-source tools, you’ll no longer be strictly limited to the manufacturers set of tools). The biggest problem people are facing is trying to convince the large instrument manufacturers to adopt such a format. Until such time as we have vendor support, the standards bodies have been forced to attempt the reverse engineering of these data formats. It’s a difficult problem because it does takes substantial effort to understand a data format that has no assurances of remaining static between releases. I’d love to see some of these manufacturers follow Microsofts lead but I don’t think its likely any time soon.