When you work at a major Internet company like Yahoo!, deployment is a Big Deal. You have millions of customers running every version of every OS imaginable, some with marginally working computers, and they all need to be able to run your software. And they need to run it now -- make them wait too long, or download too much, and they'll give up and move on to your competitors.
While I'm...
Strings are a fundamental part of any modern programming language, every bit as important as numbers. So you'd think that Java programmers would go out of their way to have a solid understanding of them -- and sadly, that isn't always the case.
I was going through the source code to Xerces (the XML parser included in Java) today, when I found a very surprising line:
com.sun.org.apache.xerces....
I'm on vacation with my family right now. Vacation time is pretty hard for me to come by -- one of the dangers of being "essential" is that nobody wants to let you leave -- so this is a noteworthy event, made possible only by the fact that I agreed to bring my cell phone and work laptop, ensure the availability of Internet access at my destination, and remain reachable twenty-four hours a day....
(For an introduction to JAXX, start here.)
First things first: JAXX 1.0.1 is finally out. This version contains a lot of bugfixes and significant improvements to the quality and size of the generated Java code. Download it here.
Now that the major 1.0 bugs are fixed and a solid baseline has been established, I'm making plans for the future. Where is JAXX headed? What's next? I've posted a...
Swing's mnemonic system is based around two properties: mnemonic (or displayedMnemonic) and displayedMnemonicIndex. They're powerful enough to do everything you need, but then again, so is machine code. There are a number of problems and limitations with the skeletal mnemonic support built in to Swing.
The Problems
They're annoying to define - One common approach is to use a properties file to...
