Dan Lucraft talks about working with MongoDB and using asynchronous observers with Rails. Also: the design of the JRuby/SWT/HTML/Javascript-based, extensible editor RedCar.
Having acquired Instantations Java tooling arm last month, Google has now released their tools for free via the Google WebToolkit project. This includes the high-quality WindowBuilder Pro, which can create GUIs in SWT, Swing and GWT, as well as GWT Designer for rapid GWT development, CodePro AnalytiX for automated software quality, and WindowTester Pro for automated UI testing.
Instantiations yesterday announced the release of WindowTester Pro 5.0, a major upgrade to its GUI testing tool adding performance and Linux support to its SWT and Swing testing utility. In addition, a minor upgrade to WindowsBuilder Pro 7.4 and RCP Developer 5.0 were also released.
Instantiations has released WindowBuilder Pro 7.0, a Java GUI builder, and which recently won the "Best commercial Eclipse-based developer tool" category at EclipseCon 2009. Updates to 7.0 include UI Factories and Nebula widget integration, along with Swing Data Binding and GWT-Ext widgets.
GUI testing is a hard and often neglected task. We take a look at two open source solutions for writing SWT and Swing tests, SWTBot and Marathon, and how they can be used from JRuby. We talked to Ketan Padegaonkar (SWTBot) and Dakshinamurthy Karra (Marathon).
As part of the upcoming Eclipse Ganymede release which is scheduled for June 25th, InfoQ will cover a series of Eclipse subprojects. Today, the subproject is RAP (Rich Ajax Platform), which is releasing version 1.1. InfoQ spoke with Jochen Krause to learn more about RAP and what it provides.
A post to the eRCP newsgroup over the weekend put forward a proposal of putting forward eRCP as an OSGi standard.
Glimmer is a library for building GUIs with JRuby and SWT. Using the Builder idiom, it allows to define GUIs very quickly, but also permits to access SWT APIs directly. Glimmer was recently proposed as an official Eclipse project, so we caught up with Andy Maleh to talk about the project.
Prompted by questions from an author of a Swing GUI design tool, lengthy debate was started on the topic of Java visual designers and resource based GUI's versus code generation on TSS and Slashdot. The TSS piece features the debate starting question of should a visually designed UI be binary / XML based or represented as generated Java code.
As soon as the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) Java UI API was released, developers as wondered if a Swing implementation could be written. A number of efforts have come and gone but the new SWTSwing project is quicking making this desire a reality.
Eclipse RCP has been in the news lately due to increased adoption numbers and the growing use of OSGi. The RCP framework provides a jumpstart to developers looking at writing modular rich client applications. Many developers are unaware that the Netbeans IDE also includes a framework to develop such applications called Netbeans Platform.
