I'd forgotten how much I like Java. I've been playing with Eclipse lately, so this inevitably leads down the path to Java development. Really Eclipse is the Swiss Army Knife of Integrated Development Environments. It's built with the same philosophy as Java. It's built with that same mindset that permeates the Java community. I'd sum it up with a simple maxim: Why should I create an object of type X then do all that work of customizing that one object when I can customize a subclass of X? If you don't know what I mean, I'm talking about the practice (and I think this is great) of subclassing, for example, JButton to make your own XyzButton. Then XyzButton has all the features you need in it. The other approach is to create a single instance of a JButton and do the specific work inside that object's code.
Rob on 4:53pm, Wednesday, 2005-09-28With a little helpful prodding, I've just finally updated the version info for my SVG switcher extension. Essentially all it does is toggle the native SVG rendering in Firefox on and off by setting the svg.enabled to true or false. You can read more about my motivation for this in my previous post, and how to install and use it here.
SVG.org points to an SVG viewer that runs on the Sony PSP. I haven't got the hardware to try it out, but it sounds interesting. I suppose it's just another platform really, like any cell phone or PDA, but somehow the video game angle makes it sound more important.
What if people linked? Dave Winer says that linking is a core value of the web (it's pretty far in, but he has some interesting things to say). Early pages linked everywhere. Now people publish articles online and they're reluctant to link. His statement at Bloggercon last year (I've been listening to the podcasts from there for a while now) was that if you talk about something and don't link to it, you've violated a core value of the web.
Ay, today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Rob on 6:00pm, Friday, 2005-09-02I just noticed that Scott's got the second installment in his Javascript Animation Tutorial up. In part 1 he covered the very basics of animation with Javascript. Now he's getting into a little more detail about performance choices. It's great read, he gets right to the point with some insight on how to get smoother animation by avoiding extra rendering in the browser.
I found an interesting article on Newsforge that talks about getting data from a MySQL database to OpenOffice applications. I think I still have an older version of OO.o installed because I don't remember seeing the "Base" application that the technique relies on.