NEWS Archive
Converted FAQs and better design
2004-02-27 18:30 by A. Digulla
ziritrion has started to convert the Frequently Asked Questions after I had
added support for the necessary elements in the SiteEditor. Also the
History of the UYD has been converted.
While he started to convert the other FAQs, I continued in my quest to
improve the HTML of the site. With the help of the great CSS example
site CSS Zen Garden which
shows what can be achieved by using CSS, I've improved the design
of the Dojo considerably (well, for the web browser and search spiders,
at least). Users will only notice that the download times were reduced
again a bit and that the pages look very different in browsers that
don't support CSS.
Smaller HTML and DojoBoard integrated
2004-01-25 20:30 by A. Digulla
News and events have an archive, now, and the
page site was reduced by 4KB (the static styles of the pages
was moved to a shared CSS file).
Also, the DojoBoard Forum was integrated into the rest of the site
(there is now a link menu and the layout of the DojoBoard
was changed to fit better into the rest of the site).
Errors!?
2004-01-20 22:00 by A. Digulla
Just fixed the error pages; you'll get now nice
error pages when you enter a non-existing URL or when one of
our CGI scripts fails.
Why the redirection in the DojoBoard Forum fails all of a sudden
is a mystery to me, though. On the commandline, the script
works. Well, in a few days, we'll have the forum fully
integrated (with links and all), so this will fix itself,
soon.
New UYD Gone Online
2004-01-18 20:00 by A. Digulla
A great moment!
The new UYD is now online!
The software behind the new UYD was written by me in about
500 hours, spread over three years!
The mind boggles.
Maybe it's better that we don't know what we're in for when
we start such a project or we would despair.
Well, this said, it's time for a small look back in time.
Or "lessons learned" as we software developers call it.
Python - a very nice OO script language. One of my
favourites over the last five years. But then came Eclipse,
the Java IDE and I must admit that changed my view quite
a bit. Eclipse adds so much power to your fingertips that
you can write three times more code in the same and with
twice the quality.
It's like squeezing water out of a sponge.
I guess that Eclipse marks the arrival of the next
generation of software development: Development
environments which support the developers in many
way, way beyond keeping the source files and compilers
in one place.
Then, we're now at Java 1.4 with 1.5 at the door. The
language (and environment) has matured. There are still
many gaps and hidden hooks but many of the more painful
omissions have been fixed by Sun or third party libraries
like the Jakarta project.
So my conclusion right now is: Python has the much more
powerful language and the better library but thanks to
Eclipse, it's now much less painfull to write software in
Java.
Lesson: Strong typing is your friend when you have an IDE
which uses the information to write the code for you.
The drawback currently is the GUI. The Python version of
the SiteEditor had a GUI (a crude one but it had one).
The Java version has "just" Eclipse.
The Python version needed about 20MB download to install
and run, Java with Eclipse weighs in at 125MB, more than
six times more.
Now, adding a UI for the SiteEditor has it's own ...
"challenges". The most natural way to proceed would be to
turn the SiteEditor into an Eclipse plugin. That means:
No Eclipse, no SiteEditor.
Also, I would have to update my plugin every time Eclipse
changes and, to add injury to insult, Eclipse uses it's
own GUI library SWT which is not available for every computer
platform.
The alternative would be to use Swing, the native Java
GUI. Unfortunately, I would have to implement most of
the things again which I get for free with Eclipse.
Which means that I have to make a wild guess into the future:
In the long run, SWT will be ported to more platforms
and bugs will be ironed out faster (to compare: SWT has
reached a mature state in two years while
Swing is still maturing).
Therefore: Next stop, The SiteEditor Eclipse plugin.
Conversion Phase 1 Completed
2004-01-15 21:30 by A. Digulla
After one month of hard work, all pages
from the Python version of the SiteEditor have now
been converted to the new format.
Also, over 95% of the original functionality has been implemented
in Java.
Which just leaves the 400 pages from the original UYD...
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