Ian Lewis' Blog

This week I updated jsXe's webpage. It looks a lot nicer now and makes use of php so that the menus and stuff are defined in only one place. That makes it a lot easier to mantain.

For the new design I just used a regular webpage with css to apply the styling. It's remarkably simple and flexable. I'm not a web guru but I see now why a lot of people find this area rewarding. It's a lot of fun to make pages using css stylesheets. PHP is also pretty fun though I wonder what it's like to create a full blown application with it. I've edited some scripts for my website but nothing substantial so I'm devoid of real php experience. Though I know enough about it to be dangerous and learn rapidly if I need to.

Yesterday I released jsXe 0.4pre3

Hopefully I'll be releasing new versions more regularly in the future. It's hard to maintain focus on Japanese study and jsXe and everything else all at once.

I really need to redo the website jsXe website soon. It's pretty crappy. The guy that designed it did an Ok job but he didn't work on it for very long. Maybe I can come up with some design requirements and have someone work on it. I'm could do it but I'm not a web guru and the website could use a bit of php scripting probably.

Anyway, I have study group with friends tonight so I gotta study a bit.

Been busy this week but I managed to add cut/copy/paste support to the tree view in jsXe cvs. Though I pulled my hair out a bit and there are some limitations, it works pretty well.

I just wish there was more interest in the project. It would help me justify the time that I put into it. I think jsXe could be a cool project and I have some good ideas for it, like a schema editing view, I feel like I don't have enough time to devote to it to make it a really cool, useful program. I guess the folks that don't need a professional XML IDE just use a text editor but jsXe can't compete with professional tools like oXygen and XMLSpy with their XSLT debuggers and professional tools. :-{

I guess I've thought about making jsXe a platform for developing plugins that allow you to do develop easily with multiple XML applications at once , and I've implemented some features in that direction already, but again that's rather ambitious and I don't think I have the time. And besides then jsXe wouldn't be the Java Simple XML Editor anymore. It would be a huge, featureful development environment.

Hey all, this weekend I'll be spending quite a bit of time on the computer. This weekend I'll be adding a few new minor features to jsXe. I haven't worked on it seriously in months. Almost as long as I've been talking to Reiko. I wonder if that had something to do with it. Anyway, I've added some DTD/Schema validation features and I'd like to expand those a bit. I'd like to add in some built in completion features for some popular XML applications too (Schema, XSLT Stylesheets, Apache Ant etc.). I also have to start seriously thinking about working on other plugins/views for jsXe. Namely the Schema View. Though sometimes I feel like it's all for naught since noone really uses jsXe but, even still, I do enjoy working on it.

I'm also trying to get back into C programming a bit. I've been mostly looking at programming with GTK+ 2.0. I've been creating some demo programs and as a learning exercise I may upgrade gorbital to GTK2. However, learning this stuff is lower on my priority list and I may not get to it this weekend.

I also would like to do a bit of upgrading on the machine as well. For a while I've been using the 2.4 series of the Linux kernel and XFree86, the second of which has been replaced by X.org in the community. Part of the reason I've been running legacy software is because I use GATOS which allows the use of some of the TV input/capture functions of my ATI All in Wonder Radeon. But I noticed recently on the GATOS site that newer versions of the Linux kernel in the 2.6 series and the new release of X.org 7.0 handle the All in Wonder Radeon's hardware acceleration and TV input correctly out of the box. I also recently had some problems with using virtual terminals on my current version of the Linux kernel and XFree86 so I think I'll be working to upgrade to both the Linux kernel 2.6 series and X.org this weekend. Needless to say (or maybe not), I do everything the hard way on my system so this may or may not be a trivial feat.

Anyway, If you want to send me some words of encouragement then I'll probably be online all weekend.

I've been working a lot on jsXe recently. Mostly on the schema view, bug fixes, better namespace support etc. The schema view is going to look pretty cool when it's farther along. I've got an early screenshot of the schema view up on the jsXe website. Hopefully I'll have a releaseable version in the next few weeks.

There is literally too much work to do on jsXe in general. Just the normal tree view, source view, and schema view will keep me busy for a good time to come. And I've got ideas and more views planned. Plus, writing an XML editor in general is hard. Lots of quirky XML gotchas. I'd like at least one other decent developer to work with but no one is very interested in the project. I suppose I've got some ways to go before I'll have folks willing to use jsXe and test it out, submit bug reports, and submit code.

The last few days have been pretty boring. We had an all day division meeting at work. It was interesting to get updates on other projects going on in Software Development but it's a WHOLE DAY. Needless to say I didn't get any actual work done.

I pretty much gave up on the work I did over the weekend on jsXe. This decision stems from the fact that it's just too hard to maintain that code and do what I want. And that difficulty is there because of the limits to the XML DOM interface in java (and the length of time it has taken to finalize DOM3). There's only so much you can do. I can't register a change listener with a Node for instance (which is what I want most).

DOM3 looks better than DOM2 but I'm still missing how I could create my own implementation of the Document interface and have an existing parser like Xerces parse an XML document, constructing the DOM using my implementation of Document. How is the DOMImplementation interface useful if I can't use existing parsers? So not only do I have to create an implementation of the Document interface myself but I have to create my own LSParser? One that uses my Document implementation. I could create my own imlementation of the Document interface but write my own parser? That seems like too much.

I really don't want to make jsXe too dependent on Xerces. I also don't want to write my own parser. I think I'm just going to get something working for the time being. I can at least work on other areas of the program.

Anyway, got to get ready for japanese meetup! mata ne

I just finished separating the gui component for the tree view in jsXe. I wish I had done more today. There's always tonight to make up for it.

I'll probobly start watching Heibane Renmei tonight tho. I'm not sure if I'll like it but we'll see. Right now I'm going to head to the store to buy some vegetables to make food because I've waited too long and I'm starving.

Workin' jsXe for most of the day today. I'm trying to separate the strait gui components for the different views from the editor specific parts. I didn't see the necessity for this at first but a few projects have used code from jsXe and basically rewrote parts of it. I would rather they used specific classes (the gui components) and wrote their own logic to integrate it into their application.

After that I need to get the find dialog working for the source view. Then implement other random features like cut & paste in the tree view. Then on to creating plugin support which I'd like to get around to soon.

Speaking of plugin support, I took another look at JGraph yesterday. That project is super sweet. The diagram components look good and work well. I can't wait to use it to create a schema designer plugin/view.

Being on the software development team for reporting at work makes me somewhat interested in reporting in general. Also given my interest in GNU software I naturally looked for open-source or free software for reporting.

In my search I came across JasperReports, which is an open-source framework for creating printable reports. It uses XML as a way to define reports and has some nice viewers for the reports. It seems like an interesting project and might apply well as a future plugin for jsXe.

I'm not sure what it is but life has been pretty boring as of late. Besides working on jsXe, working and a little reading I haven't been doing too much for the last week or so. It does seem pretty wierd that I would be bored just before christmas and leaving for Japan. I'm going to be totally busy for the next month or so but right now I'm stinkin' bored. Oh well. Maybe I'll watch a movie. I guess my bordom can't last too long since tomorrow I need to go shopping. Yay. My favorite thing to do. *sigh*

Anyway, I plan on updating this at least some while I'm in Japan. So for the few of you that actually read this come back and check for updates.

Well, today is pretty much devoted to working on jsXe.

I haven't worked on it very much in the last few weeks. I guess I've just had things get in the way of working on it. I still can't fathom how some project leaders manage to get 20+ hours a week in on their projects and still have a 40+ hour day job. I'm trying to arrange my time so that I can devote more energy to jsXe but so far I'm not satisfied with the results. If anyone has any tips please tell me.