TextEditor and ClickHandlers

Today was able to completely implement the text editor!!!! woooottt! I was a little stoked. Mostly because its the first component that we won't need to go back and add functionality to, which is very exciting. I also updated the menu, before it was created using LinkItems, now it is populated with Buttons! Buttons I tell you! not the biggest change, but it does lend its self to looking much more professional. Next step for me is the integration process. As it stands now, while all the components display themselves in one window, the problem is that they are, to some extent disconnected from each other. So, I will need to get them all to talk to each other and be able to place things on different windows and so on and so forth.

     On a different note though, I had a grand ol' time tonight working with smartGwt's event handlers. They are a lovely thing prone to all kinds of nonsense. Tonight what I found out is that you can't have multiple kinds of click handlers in one class. You might be asking yourself, isn't there just one kind of click handler? nope. not in smartGWT. here we have lots of click handlers. and what I found is that if you want to be able to use multiple kinds of click handlers. You can import the main kind like this :

Import ..form.fields.events.ClickEvent; Import .. form.fields.events.ClickHandler;

But you'd also like to use one of these: 

widgets.events.ClickEvent; widgets.events.ClickHandler;

You can't do it. 

Eclipse gets grumpy at you and so the solution is to do something horrendously gross like this:

blah.addClickHandler(new com.smartgwt.client.widgets.events.ClickHandler() { @Override public void onClick(com.smartgwt.client.widgets.events.ClickEvent event) { }   });

Isn't that wonderful?

welcome to the world I am living in. 

Anyways I am off. Too many things to do.. not enough time. 

Peace. 

Tools and exciting things

Well, recently Ian has decided that he doesn't actually want to do UI so he has moved to doing parsing stuff so with him no longer working on UI it is just me making tools that will go into the final project. That being said, I looked over the work that was done on menu creation, came to the conclusion that it was unusable with what we need to do. So, I wrote a menu creator, It is almost done, and its pretty exciting actually! the way it works is that it creates a tabbed pane viewer, this is exciting and then (the part I am working on currently) is being able to right click each individual tab which will allow you to add sub menus that drop down off each main menu item. I think this will be pretty easy and that we will be able to show professor Ackley tomorrow during our client meeting. In other news, I am still worried about all that needs to get done, but I have (so far) written: a Form Creator, a Style Creator, a Menu Creator, most of the properties panel( the rest of the work to be done there is going to be completed by John Schulz because he was really struggling with the server stuff so I took him off that and I am trying to work with him to find out what he can do.) He is supposed to have it at full functionality by tomorrow. If he is unable to do that though I will take it over.

    So, now what it is all about is taking these pieces and adding them into the framework that Theo made, and getting things going.


Still very worried.

Thoughts on first Client and Team Meeting.

Going in to this meeting, I kinda knew that it wasnt going to go so well... My thought process was: "Brace yourselves, a grilling is coming" and I knew also that our group wasnt going to be prepared for what came next. What was a bummer though was that it seemed that everything went wrong at the wrong time. For example, Theo's Eclipse just died.... wouldnt start nothing, John didnt want to show his spike, Ian was reluctant to pull out his computer even though he could tell that it was what Ackley wanted, and Alex just had a spike showing some copy-pasted GWT code... my form example went well enough, but it wasnt much... Definitely not enough to make it worth Ackley's time. Luckily, once Ian did get his computer out, he was able to show both his spike and Theo's. Still though, we arent where we need to be, so hopefully we will have nightly updates where we all get on skype and talk about what we did that day, so that we have some accountability to the group. hopefully do some screen sharing and really checking out what each group member has gotten done that day. We will see how that goes. I am getting more and more nervous as time goes on. Hopefully though, this weekend we will get some peer programming going and be able to flesh out what each person will be comtributing to the final project with and we will also be having discussions about what each member will be showing Ackley at our weekly blog.

Here's hoping...

First Spike

In the spirit of beginning the process of being prepared for the proposal our group needs to be able to present, I have created a very initial first spike using gwt-dnd which I found after some digging around. While as @Joe Collard stated in his latest blog, He was able to get drag and drop working without this tool, this tool does give us a lot of underlying functionality that will be quite invaluable in the quest to getting this project up and running. Though something that we need to take into consideration is that we will need an apache 2 license to be able to actually put this code out into the world, but when reading over the specification for getting an apache license it doesn't seem to bad :) So, here's hoping that tomorrow's presentation goes well. It will be be and Theodore Schnepper doing the main part of the presentation, because our other team members either dont feel comfortable presenting infront of the class, or more likely they aren't feeling the time crunch that Theo and I are feeling.

First Meeting

Less than success.... A lot of confusion about what exactly the project entails and how we will be going about this project. This combined with the fact that we were down one member ( who didn't show up *cough* Alexandre Rogozine *cough* ) But, main take aways from today are that we need to, as a group become much more familiar with GWT if we are going to be using it. It seems that it will provide some amazing functionality, but as far as using GWT to do JavaScript drag and drop, I am unsure. There also seems to be a disconnect with the ideas I have in my head and what the group's idea of this project is. Therefore I am going to try Theo's idea of taking from other web developers idea's and bring a big white board and sticky notes to our next meeting that way we can all have a very physical tangible way of seeing how the website will operate and how the user will interact with it, without having to do any real coding. As for Friday's presentation, Theo and I will be doing that presentation as well. Hopefully our main talking points will concern the tools we will be using, info on specifics of the project as they stand now, and where we stand on future work. This (ideally) should take up the whole time we are given. So I guess we will see how it goes... I am feeling nervous at best.

Agenda For Wednesday

I know its a bit of a silly post, but incase anybody cares, here is what our group will be talking about during our scheduled group time on Wednesday Februrary 15th

Agenda:

Discuss current Timeline 

Changes that need to be made:

Discuss strengths and weaknesses of each group member and what skills they bring to the table: 

Discuss SVN set up and have a basic discussion on GWT

Discuss presentation that will be on Friday

Begin discussion on how to divide up workload (subject to change) 

Project Update

In relation to my project proposal I was able to track down some info on basic drag-and-drop implementation using javascript and HTML. There are some awesome tools that give you a good amount of tools that will be useful if my project is chosen. Here is the link: redips.net
If anyone is planning on being a part of this project please view the the information on this site and get acquainted with the basics of drag and drop. it will be very helpful :D

Thanks!

Three Words

This assignment was given by Dave Ackley, the assignment is to provide 3 words that describe our "ideal" team.

Timely, focused, cohesive.

Proposal Review Charis Cowdrey

Here is the review I did on Charis Cowdrey's project for CS 460.
check it.

A Few thoughts on Software Craftsmanship

According to manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.com,
software craftsmanship is all about not only creating good software that runs well but creating software that is "well crafted" and increases in value as the software gets better and better, and software that is backed by a community of professionals who work hand in hand with their customers to create "productive partnerships". While this all sounds good, on a side note, I think this group should work a little harder at practicing what they preach. Because, As you can see when you go to their main website, it is currently ( as of 11:29am 2/1/12) down. Which I think doesn't really bode well for their cause if you ask me. But, continuing on, like I said before, I think that what they are trying to do is very admirable, the idea of not viewing creating software as something that can be approached from a lackadaisical standpoint is something that I think should be thought of whenever someone is approaching programming. This is important because a lot of the time what happens is that people go into programming not really thinking of the future of their project and where it might be used and under what circumstances it might be implemented. What this leads to is hack-ish code that may work for one instance of what someone is working on but then a few years down the road when this piece of code is still running out somewhere and a new programmer comes along and needs to modify this process and everything crashes because the code wasn't dynamic enough to allow for change and modification, things go awry. This is something that is always pounded into hour heads in the CS department at UNM. We are constantly encouraged to be future minded whenever we are programming because you never know if something you write is going to end up being used in some larger project where it is essential that this code work the way it is supposed to. So, I definitely agree with their ideals and motives behind what they are trying to do. My only real beef with their work ( aside from their website being down) is that it feels somewhat aliening in a certain sense. What I mean by this is that it seems that this group is trying to bring together an "elite" group of programmers and a community of only the best of the best, and this seems to me, to alienate those who really just want to learn and become better programmers, while I'm sure that they don't intend for this to happen, it seems like it is very possible that people could feel this way. So, my suggestion would be that they include in their manifesto something about helping bring other programmers up to this level so that the overall productive capacity of the world's programmers could be increased.