gwt-fireworks-demo

Recently I worked on some code for the Google IO Last Call Contest.

I started coding on a Friday afternoon after a long day's work in which I had started early at 3:30am to do some load testing. I finished up around 1:30am Saturday morning.

Basically the objective was to use GWT 2.2 and its recent support for the HTML5 canvas. The problem was to replicate in some creative way the behavior of the Google IO 2011 landing page.

My project is hosted on App Engine.

I am hosting the project on Google Code.

GWT and PhoneGap

Inspired by David's blog entry "GWT + PhoneGap = native mobile apps quickly", I decided to give this a try. Here are the steps I went through.

1. I downloaded PhoneGap and went through their basic tutorial using XCode. The template leaves you with an empty 'www' folder in your project.
2. I started with the basic code created by the Google Plugin for Eclipse and compiled it into its war directory.
3. At this point I manually picked up the code and plopped it into the 'www' folder in XCode and ran the app in the iPhone emulator. This worked as expected as the sample app runs.

At this point I wanted to adopt a more native look to the app and thus I pulled in some CSS from the JQTouch project to make the app look a bit more like a native iPhone app.

Am at the point where I want to interact with iOS and specifically the Calendar on the iPhone. I've discovered that PhoneGap does not currently have support for the Calendar API which was introduced in the iOS 4.0 SDK. I may be facing the challenge of building a PhoneGap plugin in order to natively interact with Calendar from my GWT app.

I'm not very far down the road but it seems to me there are huge benefits in being able to apply the abstractions of GWT+MVP to building a mobile application that can run natively AND be cross platform.

Look for a Part 2 to this entry where I explore building a plugin to access the Calendar API.

Install JDK6 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid

After rebuilding my netbook recently, I quickly realized that I was unable to reinstall sun-java6-jdk out of the box. After a bit of Google I was able to get JDK6 installed.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update

msmtp, a free tool to send email from Terminal

msmtp, a free tool to send email from Terminal

Putting this one on my todo list.

Stencyl - Find the Fun

Stencyl - Find the Fun

Wow games written in Java.

My Spotlight configuration

I grew tired of watching mdworker consume my CPU so I've recently resorted to this configuration.

Review: Lenovo S12 Netbook

I recently purchased a Lenovo S12 Netbook mainly for the purpose of running Ubuntu to do Google Web Toolkit programming. Recently I've had some frustration with Java programming for GWT on my MacBook Pro.

My first impression of the S12 was not a good one. It came with a Windows 7 installation that seeming incredibly bogged down by bloat-ware. On the first startup I felt as if I was being barraged right and let by popups and offers and configuration options. Yikes. The first thing I did was to perform a clean install of Windows 7 from a USB flash drive. This went rather flawlessly and subsequently I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix which also was straightforward.

Ubuntu 9.10 did not run well at all until I was able to install the NVidia drivers from the unsupported drivers utility. Using the same utility I also installed the WiFi driver. So far, these are the only two drivers I've worked with. I would recommend having your netbook plugged into an ethernet port if possible when installing Ubuntu.

Moving on to setup of the development environment, nothing could be easier than letting the package manager do all of the work of downloading and installing everything I needed. I let the package manager install the basic Eclipse but then replaced it with the Java EE package from eclipse.org. One problem I have encountered with Eclipse is that there seems to be an issue possibly with the video driver causing the buttons in the GUI to be unresponsive to mouse clicks.

I have not yet tackled getting the onboard camera to function.

Overall I'm very happy with the machine and have no idea how anyone can function without a clean install of Windows 7 or another OS. It is too bad that Lenovo chooses to trash the experience.