I haven’t posted in a while, mostly because I haven’t had time. I just wanted to post a short update on my development activities over the past while. One big thing to note is that I have finally adopted Git as my primary source version control system. I had been using SVN for years, but once I started playing around with Git it was clear that I had to make the move. Git is much faster for checking out and committing. It also makes branching and merging much easier than with SVN. The most compelling feature of Git, though, is Git Hub. It provides a much easier way to share my code with the world, and it makes it a simple matter for others to contribute.
I have created repositories for Xataface and many of its modules on GitHub. I have also moved SWeTE over.
PDF CJK Fonts
I recently developed a library for PDFClown to support Chinese, Korean, and Japanese fonts. This is a feature that is nowhere to be found in the world of open source PDF editors (iText is excluded from this list because of its AGPL license). Check out the source for this module on the github project page.
Codename One Javascript Components
I have also created a few Codename One wrappers for Javascript components. So far I have created a charting module, and a rich text editor module. Both use my Javascript bridge for the Java-Javascript communication. I created these, partly, as a proof of concept. Codename One sits at a unique junction between Java, Native, and Javascript. The ideal situation is to have as much as possible implemented in pure Java so that it is available across all platforms (JME, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS), but the fact is that there are thousands of mature, well-supported Javascript libraries that can nicely complement the codename one toolbox. Javascript components should be compatible with the big 3: WinPhone, Android, and iOS.. Any platform that supports a native browser component.
One issue that I have faced is that the Codename One build server currently doesn’t retain package structure for resources on iOS and WinPhone. All resources are just flattened into the topmost directory of the application bundle. This is a pretty big problem for Javascript components since most will consist of a directory of resources including javascript, CSS, HTML, and image files, and they depend on their relative package structure.
The problem has been reported in issue 809. There are two possible current workarounds:
- Use offline builds for iOS. These support package structures for resources.
- Try to embed everything into a single HTML file, and then embed this file as a String in a Java class. I used this strategy in the Charts module – everything is embedded into a package private Resources class.