Ready Reckoner Area

Turns out the Standard Widget Toolkit isn't so 'standard' after all... :-(

There are some unique gotcha's which are irrelevant if one plans to distribute as a Windows only product .... however various errors arise as one attempts to export a distributable platform independent standalone. I'm sure many of you will know that dll's ( dynamic link libraries ) are purely an M$ thingy - so there's no way our Linux and Mac friends will be enjoined by a jar ( which is a zip with additives ) containing them. One can use SWT cross-platform but not without some likely fiddly/onerous setup at the client end. I wish I'd known that a month ago! :-)

So it now looks like SWT is outside my goal spec of a one-shot download ( well, given that a client JVM is pre-installed and at the ready ). Nonetheless it looks like I can re-factor using 'Swing' instead. It's a simpler but less 'sexy' looking GUI system already within all current JVM distributions so won't require any troublesome magic for the clients. Fortunately I kept the GUI logic partitioned/separate from the main program logic! :-)

So I'll have a crack at that .... :-)

Cheers, Mike.

NB. Also thanks to Brian Silvers for his kind suggestions ( PM ), but it turned out to be the way Douglas Adams said ( of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, the makers of Marvin the Paranoid Android ) - that the superficial design flaws covered the deep design flaws ..... :-)

It's a pack/tribe thing. As usual, it's best to be neither the first nor the last .... :-)

While I was not given an untruth per-se, what wasn't mentioned ( and for my purposes you can see why I see this as a key point ) was that: SWT cross-platform distribution is not wrapping up a single jar ( ie. no OS dependent versioning within ) containing only JVM byte code to be confidently thrown at any conforming JVM installation. The 'V' is for virtual, right?

I found out this nugget ( as you could predict ) by trawling the allied user/developer forums, and certainly not on the IDE/Plugins sites that you source these things from! I'm relieved that I was not alone in my assumptions .... :-)

Silly me .... people are subtly Balkanizing the open source landscape .... and it's probably the same one's who whinged about the 'asymmetry' of the M$/Sun dispute, incidentally over the ownership/rights to Java. :-(

Now I'll move on, as Buzz LightYear says - 'to infinity and beyond'. [ The ultimate do-loop specification ]

Thanks for listening .... :-)

Cheers, Mike.

Way to go Brian .... Like I told my daughter for her art class, get good marks by following the teacher ( who is a numb nut ) but do better paintings at home!

Anyhow codefiends I have quickly ripped out a barely working GUI shell for RR8 after re-factoring to Swing. Don't get too excited as it does very little beyond proof of concept, as I still have to convert the content of the Validate & Plotting tabs ( already completely written for SWT ) to Swing.
It should:[pre]
- resize pleasantly
- exit using the menubar : File -> Exit
- minimise/restore/maximise/exit with the usual upper right icons
- give a prissy 'About' box using the menubar : Help -> About
- select between 'Data'/'Validate'/'Plotting' panes using their tabs
- on the 'Data' tab I expect:
- 'Clear' button to clear the central yellow text area.
- 'Load' button provokes a file open dialog
- 'Save' button provokes a file save dialog
- 'Validate' button moves you to the 'Validate' tab
[/pre]It won't ( yet ) load/save files to any directory other than the one you unzipped into ( where 'ReadyReckoner.jar' is ), regardless of your folder/directory traversal in the file dialogs.

So:
- get the zip file
- unzip to some suitable out of the way directory.
- don't alter the placement of any files or sub-directories ( the /lib folder contains other jars referenced by paths in a manifest file that the JVM loader will use - so they have to be where they are said to be ).
- I've put a small 'test.rrd' file for you to fiddle with if you like. Roll your own if you want, it's the same CSV format we've been using all along. I thought: rrd = Ready Reckoner Data, and this is my default extension choice. Though the file dialogs will allow for other extensions, I've pre-filtered them using this one. I don't know of any prior usage conflict elsewhere ( please advise ).

As I said, I'm only making sure I can distribute it and you can run it. If this test works I don't see any further difficulties in that regard at least ( famous last .... )

Cheers, Mike.