I was mulling at the end of last year that while I’ve been programming for far too many years now its been for the most part web development and databases. But I don’t know how to build a GUI, and least of all one that would be cross platform. Time to learn.
I’ve just picked myself up a copy of O’Reilly Java Swing 2nd Edition which, while its old, should help me get to grips with building my first GUIs.
As an interesting learning process I’ve decided that while of course this is all about Java that I am going to read the book in Java, I shall translate it all into JRuby since I use Ruby as my programming language of choice. So I’ll learn three skills in one;
- GUI Development
- Java
- JRuby
I think the best way to pick it up is to go through every last example until it becomes second nature so all the Java AWT and Swing examples I come across in the book I shall be adding in a new jruby-swing github repository are here as JRuby.
https://github.com/braindeaf/jruby-swing
In fact here’s the first example
https://raw.github.com/braindeaf/jruby-swing/master/chapter2/ToolbarFrame1.rb
Desktop app here I come.
Needed to get rid of PostegreSQL on start up. That’s freeing up 8Mb of memory….its better than nothing.
rails@cool-server-name-001:~$ sudo update-rc.d -f postgresql-8.3 remove
Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 ...
/etc/rc0.d/K21postgresql-8.3
/etc/rc1.d/K21postgresql-8.3
/etc/rc3.d/S19postgresql-8.3
/etc/rc4.d/S19postgresql-8.3
/etc/rc5.d/S19postgresql-8.3
/etc/rc6.d/K21postgresql-8.3
Just signed up to a new New Relic account today for a client and got a free t-shirt to book. Now its not that I’m without clothes but I do like grey and I’m not afraid to admit I am a nerd. So why the hell not. All you need to do is sign up and deploy your first app which isn’t that much of a bother really and I was going to do it anyway.
Sign up for New Relic and get your free t-shirt and that also gives you 10% off your first bill which is nothing if you use the free version and $50 off my own bill that I am not paying anyway because I’m using the free version :)
Its all about the FREE.
Installed latest Rubygems which broken my dev environment.
Rob-Laceys-MacBook-Pro:app roblacey$ ./script/rails s
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/specification.rb:990:in `date=': invalid date format in specification: "2011-9-23" (Gem::InvalidSpecificationException)
  from /Users/roblacey/repos/app/ruby/1.8/bundler/gems/compass-cb709350942f/compass.gemspec:7
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/specification.rb:1346:in `initialize'
  from /Users/roblacey/repos/app/ruby/1.8/bundler/gems/compass-cb709350942f/compass.gemspec:4:in `new'
  from /Users/roblacey/repos/app/ruby/1.8/bundler/gems/compass-cb709350942f/compass.gemspec:4
One to remember next time something screwy happens, and I am to lazy to use rvm
sudo gem uninstall rubygem-update -v 1.8.10
sudo gem install rubygems-update -v 1.5.2
sudo update_rubygems _1.5.2_
In order to start moving with building Warcraft AddOns you might want to extract the Blizzard UI Code and Art bundles. A little bit fiddly but…
/Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/World\ of\ Warcraft.app/Contents/MacOS/World\ of\ Warcraft -console
On the login screen hit /~ to open the console and type
> exportInterfaceFiles code
> exportInterfaceFiles art
You should now have two new directories in your World Of Warcraft (/Applications/World of Warcraft/) BlizzardInterfaceArt and BlizzardInterfaceCode directory.
Rob-Laceys-MacBook-Pro:World of Warcraft roblacey$ ls -la
total 3944
drwxrwxrwx 21 roblacey admin 714 24 May 08:59 .
drwxrwxr-x+ 71 root admin 2414 22 May 11:45 ..
-rw-r--r--@ 1 rl admin 12292 24 May 08:59 .DS_Store
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 3 May 18:35 Background Downloader.app
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 3 May 18:35 Blizzard Updater.app
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 24 May 08:59 BlizzardInterfaceArt
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 24 May 08:59 BlizzardInterfaceCode
drwxrwxrwx 4 rl admin 136 21 Apr 23:50 Cache
drwxrwxrwx 30 rl admin 1020 24 May 08:59 Data
drwxrwxrwx 2 rl admin 68 18 Apr 22:19 Errors
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 22 Apr 00:03 Interface
drwxrwxrwx 11 rl admin 374 22 May 11:45 Logs
drwxrwxrwx 2 rl admin 68 3 May 21:02 Movies
-rwxrwxrwx 1 rl admin 67140 22 May 11:45 Patch.html
drwxrwxrwx 11 rl admin 374 22 May 11:50 Updates
drwxrwxrwx 5 rl admin 170 22 May 11:56 WTF
-rwxrwxrwx 1 rl admin 177 24 May 08:59 WoW.mfil
-rwxrwxrwx 1 rl admin 1927052 22 May 11:45 WoW.tfil
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 3 May 18:35 World of Warcraft Launcher.app
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 3 May 18:35 World of Warcraft Repair.app
drwxrwxrwx 3 rl admin 102 22 May 11:45 World of Warcraft.app
My first World Of Warcraft AddOn, ok so I found a nice tutorial on WowWiki – http://www.wowwiki.com/AddOn_programming_tutorial/Introduction .
- HelloWorld.toc
## Interface: 40000
## Title: Hello World!
## Notes: My first AddOn
HelloWorld.lua
HelloWorld.xml
- HelloWorld.lua
function HelloWorld()
print("Hello World!");
end
- HelloWorld.xml
<Ui xmlns="http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ui/"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ui/
..\..\FrameXML\UI.xsd">
<Script File="HelloWorld.lua"/>
<Frame name="HelloWorldFrame">
<Scripts>
<OnLoad>
HelloWorld();
</OnLoad>
</Scripts>
</Frame>
</Ui>
And there if you look in the chat console ‘Hello World!’. Kungla is so impressed he needs to have a proper long sit down.
This
redirects = []
redirects << params[:redirect_to] || request.referrer
…does not mean this…
redirects = []
redirects << (params[:redirect_to] || request.referrer)
…it means this.
redirects = []
(redirects << params[:redirect_to]) || request.referrer
Having used Rails I18n translations in yaml for some time, we’ve recently started thinking about how users might want to customise content on the fly, without editing flat files and reloading our application. In my mind it should read from the database.
I found the Il8n Backend Database plugin, however it appears its not Rails 3 compliant yet and we can cope with and probably should build the interface for updating our own translations
https://github.com/dylanz/i18n_backend_database
It seems there was support for ActiveRecord in the i18n gem, but it has since been moved out into the i18n-active_record gem.
./Gemfile
gem 'i18n-active_record',
:git => 'git://github.com/svenfuchs/i18n-active_record.git',
:require => 'i18n/active_record'
./config/initializers/i18n.rb
I18n.backend = I18n::Backend::ActiveRecord
Translation = I18n::Backend::ActiveRecord::Translation
./db/migrate/20101218175356_create_translations.rb
class CreateTranslations < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
create_table :translations do |t|
t.string :locale
t.string :key
t.text :value
t.text :interpolations
t.boolean :is_proc, :default => false
end
end
def self.down
drop_table :translations
end
end
irb
irb(main):001:0> I18n.t('loathsome')
=> "loathsome"
irb(main):002:0> Translation.create(:locale => :en, :key => 'loathsome', :value => 'dave')
=> #<I18n::Backend::ActiveRecord::Translation id: 1, locale: :en, key: "loathsome", value: "dave", interpolations: nil, is_proc: false>
irb(main):003:0> I18n.t('loathsome')
=> "dave"
So fairly simple start, it shouldn’t be too difficult to build an interface to handle this.
You can even keep the existing flat files as a fallback if the translations don’t exist in the database.
./config/initializers/i18n.rb
I18n.backend = I18n::Backend::Chain.new(I18n::Backend::ActiveRecord.new, I18n.backend)
Translation = I18n::Backend::ActiveRecord::Translation
