Author Archives: pdoubleya

The JVM as a Language Host

A frequent topic of discussion these days is whether, and to what extent, the Java Virtual Machine is suited for languages other than Java, and in particular “dynamic” languages like Ruby. Sun says yes, others disagree–so how do we settle … Continue reading

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Pragmatism(1)

The last couple of days people have been pointing out Chris Oliver’s blog on his new language, F3. F3 is a language hosted on the JVM which targets creating content in 2D, using Java2D APIs. I won’t go into the details, … Continue reading

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On the road again

For a long time, I haven’t been blogging, partly because I really wanted a cross-posting with my own website, and was too lazy to set it up. I will be, therefore, courageous and just starting blogging again, as I have … Continue reading

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Xilize!

So a few days ago I took another look at Xilize, and man, is it great. We’re preparing a release for Flying Saucer, the XHTML/CSS renderer project, and I needed to update (and write) a bunch of documentation. The last docs were … Continue reading

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Navigation Musings

I’ve been looking at several different UI tools and programs for hierarchical information display. Some of these are almost purely graphical, others are purely textual, and others split the difference. Some links: TouchGraph HyperGraph Jung FreeMind Prefuse Java Outliner Editor … Continue reading

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Things that still work, years later

Just came across the subArctic website. subArctic was apparently a program out of Georgia Tech for a “new” UI infrastructure for Java–back when AWT was the rage. The amazing thing is how many of the demos still work, ten years … Continue reading

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Rich clients look like the future (to me)

I’ve been thinking about rich clients apps (RCA) versus HTML client apps (HCA), and why I tend to like rich clients better. The RC app that most impressed me in the last few years was iTunes; for an HCA, it … Continue reading

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Unit-testing Performance

Perfomance regressions: I was wondering this morning if it might make sense to write unit tests to verify performance of specific operations. The basic idea is that we have a unit test that prepares the run and executes a certain … Continue reading

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Utility Servers in the JVM

Utilities Servers: I’ve been thinking more about Nailgun, the server which hosts small Java programs to be run from the command line. One question is, why can’t (or don’t we) use Java more often for common utility tasks? Think of … Continue reading

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Easy 3D

Cool Swing/3D demo! Just checked out a Swing-based Java3D demo from Romain Guy’s Weblog and it looks pretty cool. You see books as 3D images from Amazon, and see them rotate in real time to display the spline as well … Continue reading

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