Re: onCourse product launch

From: Aristedes Maniatis (ar..sh.com.au)
Date: Thu Sep 28 2006 - 19:09:18 EDT

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    Thanks to everyone's kind comments. End users hardly ever see the
    same things as fellow developers, so it is nice when our hard work on
    the little touches gets noticed.

    On 29/09/2006, at 6:59 AM, Lindsay Steele wrote:

    > I think the app is great, I like the jiggling logon screen when
    > you get an incorrect logon.

    Yes, I hope Apple doesn't have a patent on jiggling :-) But it is a
    nice way to give the user instant feedback even before they read the
    message.

    > Personally, I have been doing a few internal utility applications
    > in Swing using cayenne's ROP and it has worked fantastically.
    > Using Netbeans Matisse GUI builder allows for very quick and good
    > looking interfaces. It has been a pleasure to work with and a
    > much better experience than trying to do the same thing in a web
    > application. You get instant AJAX and an over all quicker
    > interface to both use and develop.

    We used Matisse ourselves in this project. Actually we started with
    Intellij, got frustrated by the limitations of its approach (with a
    custom jar) since we couldn't hook into the constructors the way we
    wanted, then moved to JBuilder for about a month and finally found
    the Matisse editor in a Netbeans 5.0 beta release. We now use
    Netbeans 5.5b2 and it works really well. Mostly. It isn't Interface
    Builder (OSX/C++/ObjC) which is gorgeous, but it isn't bad.

    In the early days we toyed with using QT for the GUI and writing this
    project in C++. Believe it or not Cayenne is what encouraged us to
    write in Java. Well, in those early days we were still looking at
    Hibernate and EOF as well, but there isn't the quality range of ORM
    tools in languages other than Java.

    We target JDK 1.4 in this release which has meant that some weird
    Swing bugs have taken lots of time, but one day when we can focus on
    1.6 only I suspect that quite a few things will be easier.

    For those of you playing with onCourse, take a look at our
    clairvoyance field (where the field types ahead and guesses what you
    want). That is probably our single biggest bit of Swing/Cayenne/Java
    achievement and took a lot of work. You can see one where you enter
    (say) a qualification name in the course edit view.

    We have more to do with Cayenne, most particularly record locking
    between remote clients (probably pessimistic), and distributed cache
    invalidation (again between clients possibly on different networks
    with firewalls between), so you'll continue to see us lurking on this
    list.

    Cheers
    Ari Maniatis

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