Archive for August 2006
Creating and Debugging ThinWire Applications with Eclipse
This tutorial will walk you through the creation of a simple Rich Internet Application with ThinWire using Eclipse 3.2 (Callisto) and the Eclipse Web Tools (WTP). It will also show you how to use these tools to debug your ThinWire application.
NOTE: Neither Eclipse nor the WTP plugins are necessary for ThinWire development. There are also other methods of using Eclipse to debug your ThinWire application that don’t require the WTP, but this currently appears to be the most straight-forward approach. Read the rest of this entry »
Towards the Optimal Javascript Inheritance Technique
Lead developer of the ThinWire Framework Joshua Gertzen has written an article going over existing approaches to implementing OO inheritance in Javascript (including the famous example by Douglas Crockford) and explains the final solution that they needed on the ThinWire framework for super class method calling.
The Secret of JavaScript Class Inheritance and Polymorphism
While there are many methods that attempt to make JavaScript into an Object Oriented Language, most fall short when it comes to the ability to call methods on parent classes. This article analyzes several broken approaches, including the famous one by Douglass Crockford, and then presents a working solution.
ThinWire v1.2 beta2 Released
After several weeks of hard work, the next beta has been released. You can read all about it at the ThinWire Blog. The main two things are the ability to change the style of each component or the entire application at a global level through a properties file, and a major performance enhancement minimizing client-server traffic.
My main contribution to this release is the RangeComponent interface and two component implementations of this interface: Slider and ProgressBar. The progress bar is very useful for providing feedback to the user while your application is doing some sort of processing. The slider is used for selecting a numeric value from a specified range of values.
As this release was mainly about style, I have revamped the look of ThinWire Mail (my demo application built in my spare time). Today we are also announcing live demos of ThinWire, so you can click here to try out ThinWire Mail without having to download anything.
Star Trekkin
Matt Damon as Captain Kirk
What do you think? Could it work?
Star Trek XI Site
Ok, so they got JJ Abrams to executive produce the next Star Trek Movie. That’s exciting. According to IMDB, Matt Damon is slated to play Captain Kirk. I’m not sure what to think about that. Last week, a teaser poster for the movie was released. Looks cool. It’s too bad the movie is 2 years off. Here’s the official site for Star Trek XI info.
Discuss: When is it appropriate to use applets?
Last night my wife was enrolling in her university’s health insurance plan. The insurance company’s website committed one of my biggest web development pet peeves: using a Java applet for a navigation menu. This brings up my question: when is it appropriate to use a Java applet on your web site? I’d appreciate your responses in the comments thread.
(As a side note, it was also very poorly implemented. I got an error saying that I needed to make sure Java was installed for Internet Explorer on my version of Windows. We were using Safari on the Mac!!)
