I was recently tipped off by Tom Wheeler to use NSIS for client installers. Yea I know, "what about webstart?". Well some applications need to be brain dead. In fact one project we struggled with users messing up their JRE installs which caused our web start application to fail.

Additionally alot of enterprises have nightly build and or general release processes. What this means is that the person that is doing the build should build from one environment and have the entire suite built accordingly. For example on one project there are 100s of items built on linux as well as three or four Swing applications. However the user shouldn't have to go to a windows machine and perform the installer generation for the Swing applications.

Welcome to 2006 :-)

The February AJUG meeting is *tonight* Monday (13th February) at the IIB.

Chris Palmer is our speaker:

JGOODIES BINDING; Binding domain data to Swing Components

Flight Centre are our sponsor:

http://flightcentre.com.au

JGOODIES BINDING

Bind domain data to Swing components

The JGoodies Binding library connects object properties to Swing user interface components. And it helps you represent the state and behavior of a presentation independently of the GUI components used in the interface. Martin Fowler describes the architectural patterns implemented by the JGoodies Binding in the additions to his book "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture".

A discussion between Tim Boudreau of Netbeans, Paul Gibson of MultiTrode Pty Ltd and Chris Palmer of Kcc Tech Pty Ltd.

1. What is your project?

In order to understand our Netbeans project a little back ground about the systems the company builds. MultiTrode is a leader in pump station management systems. The company was formed in 1986 and operates from its head office and factory at Brisbane Technology Park, Eight Mile Plains, just south of Brisbane; Australia. The company designs and manufactures pump station controllers, pump station supervisors, SCADA software, web-based monitoring and level sensors. MultiTrode supplies municipal and industrial customers worldwide and its products are widely specified as cost-effective solutions to pump station applications.

We needed a client application that allows our end users the ability to quickly configure the MultiSmart system in an intuitive and efficient manner.

Background
I am currently working on a Netbeans Rich Client project that persists its data into XML files. The XML files configure a much larger software system. I needed binding layer to the xml files where I could model the business objects in an XML schema then have the build process generate the tier ( Domain Tier ?) on the fly. It was important that changes could be accomodated through XML schema adjustments rather than client components.

Options
I looked into open source alternatives that would provide the services we were looking for:

1) Lightweight
2) Extensible

Here is a link to the presentation I gave to the Java Users Group in Brisbane.

Abstract:

Building applications with Swing presents an organization with quite a
few challenges. If standards aren’t enforced employee turnover can lead
to maintenance difficulties. Creating an application framework allowing
developers to plug in new modules and Information Technology groups to
update them on demand is quite an effort and can take multiple man years
of effort. Using Netbeans as the basis for Swing applications minimizes
risks for an organization desiring to use the J2EE platform for advanced

Well I finally made the switch to Linux. I feel somewhat liberated. I chose Ubuntu linux because a good friend of mine, Shinzui, loves it.

I will try to share some of my experiences here.

You can get a live or install iso image at the Ubuntu home page. I chose to download it using the Azureus client.

The live iso image is really nice because you can run linux on your pc without installing it. This was really nice because I could validate alot up front without installing it.