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Hi! I'm Patrick Wright, and I work as a freelance software engineer based in Berlin, Germany. Go ahead and get in touch!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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
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
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
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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Tagged jvm, RIA, UI
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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
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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Modality
I was thinking about the MVC (Model-View-Architecture) design model while looking at an application with notifications. The application is mainly accessed through a complicated GUI client. Notifications are triggered by data-bound conditions, and on a notification, one either has colors … Continue reading
Nailgun is Cool
I’ve been checking out Marty Lamb’s Nailgun project, which is a Java server running classes, executed by a small command-line client in C, using a custom communication protocol. The C client, of course, starts up immediately, and the cost of … Continue reading
