NEWS Archive

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).

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.

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...

More Features
2004-01-14 17:30 by A. Digulla

Character pages now contain a list of stories in which they are mentioned and story synopses have a list of comics in which this story is reprinted.