Category Archives: GWT Client

Phil 1.2.12

8:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY(?)

Working on Applet stuff

More pages that cover Javascript/HTML/Java communication: http://www.raditha.com/java/javascript.php
It turns out that browsers call applets in unique ways, something that surprises none of you reading this. There is a Java tool, called htmlconverter.jar that comes with the 1.5 (and greater?) jdk. More info is here: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/plugin/developer_guide/html_converter_more.html
Going to try to run two applets inside the same web page and make sure that the canvas is allocated correctly.
Looks like communication from JS to Java is handled through AppletLoader.getApplet(). Java to JavaScript is handled normally. http://lwjgl.org/forum/index.php?topic=3266.0

More on communication, from the LWJGL website: http://www.lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Deploying_with_the_LWJGL_Applet_Loader_4_-_Polish_and_Tweaks

Added my JavaScript color button. Events are working and I think it’s vanilla that it will work on all browsers? Yup. So far…
Running the two applet webpage on fgmdev here: http://fgmdev.com:8080/lwjgl/twoApplets.html. It took one refresh to get everything working in Firefox, but Chrome and IE worked just fine. If you try this in your browser, let me know how it works in the comments section. Focus works too. If you click in the applet, you can move the rotating square with the arrow keys.
Sending a string from JavaScript to the spinning quad via the LWJGL Appletloader:

document.getElementById(‘myApplet’).getApplet().setColor(colorStr)

Working on communicating with JavaScript from the applet.

Doing this with Maven: http://rostislav-matl.blogspot.com/2011/10/java-applets-building-with-maven.html
Had to point the buildpath at plugin.jar, which was in my Java jre/lib directory. It’s not in Maven. If this all works, I’ll add it to our local repo.
Got it. You can call a JS function or an element in the document. Kinda cool, actually. This turned out to be the most useful link: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/scripting/javatojs.aspx. You can play with the running code here.

Cool pix for the day – multiple applets running in all browsers:

Phil 12.30.11

8:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY
- Going through the LWJGL tutorials here.
- Got a window test up and running with keyboard interaction and (fast!) animation.
- Added Applet capability to the above. It runs in the Eclipse Applet viewer. Now I need to get it to run in Tomcat…
- Sun/Oracles Applet development examples
- Deploying with the LWJGL Applet Loader 1 – Basics
- Success! Using basicapplet.html in Phil/applet/lwjgl folder. Need to look at how to send data between the wrapper and the 3D app, since it’s going through the lwjgl applet wrapper.

Dong Shin 12.29.2011

working at home
nicer interface on upgraded blog!
working on Project Manager GWT

finally got the financial data displayed just like PPM

fetching all the data at once, getProjectDetails. This returns all Budget Centers, Budget Amounts, and Obligations/Outlays

NULL fields displaying 0.0, need to work on parsing data correctly
works really fast in compiled mode, unlike slow PPM
working on data formatting/editing

Phil 12.29.11

8:00 – 4:00 VISIBILITY

Working through the C3DL tutorials
Looking for a good tutorial on doing JavaScript with eclipse and not having the best of luck.

Neat, somewhat related tool: http://www.ixedit.com/
Eclipse is building a web-based IDE for JavaScript called Orion. We need to keep an eye on this.

Mike tried getting jebGl to work on site but only got a big scary core dump. After pondering, I’m thinking that a valid direction would be to have our charting running in Applets that handle J3D, and the user interface is all GWT. Applets and JavaScript can talk to each other, so the communication shouldn’t be a bif deal. It’s possible that we could put some declarative xml together that would allow GWT to feed a chart template to a general purpose applet, so we could have a high-lever interface defining the presentation and interaction. Next steps are:

A lightweight “Hello World” 3D Applet that we can attempt to deploy. We can use Applet rather than JApplet, since we won’t have any GUI overhead.

Probably going to use LWJGL, since it’s been good to me in the past.

A web page that has JavaScript talking to our applet

Phil 12.28.2011

8:00 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

Watching the OReilly video OpenGL and 3D in HTML5. If you have an ACM membership, you can watch it from your Safari bookshelf. You do have your FGM-provided ACM membership, don’t you?
Looks like picking is going to be an issue, but we can do it old-school: http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=3336

If you use C3DL, picking is supported. Hmmm.

Learning WebGL cookbook
WebGL Cheat Sheet (API as of February 2010)
glMatrix (appears to be the fastest library?)
C3DL looks promising. It even explains why Mike’s firefox WebGL was turned off. Going to read this one tomorrow.
11:00 meeting with Clif S. and his gang

Showed the various VISIBILITY apps. It looks like they should be useful
Discussed WebGL development option

Phil 12.26.11

8:00 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

Happy Boxing Day!
Tried sending an email to Clif S. At all the various permutations of his name and none of them seem to be right. Hmmm.
fgmdev.com is still responding really slowly. http://www.fgmdev.com:8080 seems quick though, so the Tomcat server is running well, but lampp isn’t?
- At 9:30, things are considerably faster.
- At 9:31 things are slow again
- Had to start up svn. What is going on with our server!!!?
Starting with the gwtgl documentation.
- And while we’re at it, time for a new version of Eclipse (3.7.1 – Indigo). Trying a 64-bit version again… I also copied it to fgmdev/exchange/EclipseDistros if you don’t want to wait 17 minutes for the download
- Tried the tutorial, which didn’t work (and from the comments, doesn’t work for many people). Checked out the code from https://gwtgl.googlecode.com/svn/. That kindof works…
  - Only check out GwrGl and GwtGl-techDemos. GwtGL-examples doesn’t seem to have anything in it, and competes for the same namespace as techDemos (which checks out as “examples”)
New version of GWT In Action is available on fgmdev/exchange/Books

Phil 12.23.11

9:00 – 4:00

Prepping for interview. It went well. They want to visualize lots of data.
In thinking about the above, I’ve started to worry about the graphing capability within GWT, which is not really even as good as Flex. I’m starting to think that we could use GWT for what it’s good at – text fields, comboboxes and such, while developing standalone charts in WebGL (3D). The reason for this is that once we’re in the 3D realm, drawing cool things actually becomes easier. Shiny is done with reflection mapping as opposed to layuers of vector art. Hardware accelerated 3d is capable of showing tens of thousands of points in a frame – orders of magnitude more than 2D systems
- http://code.google.com/p/gwtgl/– GWT wrapper for WebGL
- http://code.google.com/p/jebgl/ – Java applet wrapper to handle webGL calls for browsers that don’t support webGL (I’m looking at you, Internet Explorer…)
I asked Mike to try putting a gwtgl app inside jebgl to see if its possible

Phil 12.22.11

9:30 – VISIBILITY

The days are getting longer!
Downloaded SmartGWT. I talked to Dong about the risks of mixing them, as well as the advantages/disadvantages of each. He thinks that GWT is easier to work with.

Dong Shin 12.21.2011

developing PPM with GWT
- spent past few days creating UI mimicking PPM
- mixing GWT with SmartGWT is not very good… Some dynamic object creation throws exceptions that are hard to find where it came from.
- getting list of projects from database
- displaying list of projects in SmartGWT
  - special parsing required to use their ListGridRecord

Phil 12.21.11

9:30 – 2:30 VISIBILITY

Hmm. Can’t seem to edit an entry when using IE. Odd. May poke at this later…
Heading over to the fort for the first time since I broke my leg. Hopefully my glasses are still there
- Talked to Tangie. We’re going to try to find some number (10-ish) of non TST users that we can get to enter data before the end of the year. If that works, then we’ll try to get all the non TST folks by Jan 17th.
Went poking around looking for drawing capabilities in GWT. Canvas is supported by GWT and appears to be supported in all browsers starting with IE9

Phil 12.19.11

9:00 – 1:00 VISIBILITY

Feeling much better today. The limp isn’t so severe either.
Good article on Linux usability. but generally applicable as well: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/what-s-the-best-linux-desktop-environment–1045280?artc_pg=1
Cool thing for the day: http://www.commoncrawl.org/
Starting chapter 5. No, there is no chapter 5. Starting chapter 6.
- OK, I can see the point of UIBinder as a way of taking work that a designer has done and linking it to back-end functionality, but hopefully we won’t have to do to much of that. Moving on…
Starting chapter 7 with high hopes

Mike 12.15.2011

Meeting with Tange this morning, went well. Potentially more work for Dong
Finished the maven + gwt documentation, a Word doc and several sample applications are available in our svn at trunk/GWT_folder/samples/
- The word doc in in the sample-maven-app project
- At a minimum you will want to download the projects and copy / paste from their poms to set up your own projects
- The Word documentation gives a step-by-step on how to build the projects from scracth

Phil 12.15.11

9:30 – 12:30, 3:30 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

Walked around without crutches for 45 min or so, including vacuuming. I ache.
I just realized that you can have inner classes in GWT. Nice.
Added a blurb about SmartGWT to our GWT Info page
Finished Chaper 3

Phil 12.14.11

9:00 – 12:00, 2:30 – 3:30 VISIBILITY

Spent about 30 minutes doing laps of the house without crutches at around 7:00 this morning, then had to lay down for about an hour to let the leg recover. It wasn’t pretty, but much better than yesterday, when I could only stand that for a few minutes.
Now that I have GWT working, I’m going to go through the book (GWT in Action) unless someone has a better suggestion
Spent an unreasonably long time getting a request for a doctor’s note that will allow me to charge hours while on disability
Tom brought up the laptop. I have two screens! Woot.

Phil 12.13.11

8:00 – 12:00, 4:00 – 5:00VISIBILITY

Setting up a developer account with admin privileges on my home machine since I can’t launch the GWT server otherwise. Yay! Everything is working. Going to revisit the StockWatcher RPC tutorial to get back up to speed.
- All working.
Asked Tom to bring up my laptop, since mine is broken. There’s also a DigiKey order here.

viztales

Dimension reduction, State, Orientation, and Speed