Home: www.clevercactus.com

CleverCactus is a small software operation in Dublin, Ireland. They've created a "Personal Collaboration Platform" - a great looking desktop app that supports Email, Calendaring, Contacts, and Weblogs. Sometimes we're asked about the paucity of mainline consumer-oriented desktop applications written with the Java programming language. If you're a long time Swing Sightings reader you've seen plenty of examples of everyday desktop apps, however few hit dead-center for the tasks we all spend our days toiling at, as CleverCactus does. As of this writing (August 2003) the product is just out in its second beta release. By the time this edition of Swing Sightings finally hits the street you're sure to be seeing something newer.

Here's one other important bit of information. "Cactus" is the name of the developer's cat. Yes, we asked.

(note: click on the images for larger views)

 

Home: www.whatifsports.com/mlb-h

I just finished the new book by Michael Lewis called "Moneyball". One of the book's main themes is the quest by baseball statistic data miners (called Sabermaticians) for "new baseball knowledge". And what do they do with that knowledge? Some of them manage professional baseball teams but most of them apply it to Fantasy Baseball leagues. A very popular game (obsession) where players assemble teams of players from the current Major League Baseball rosters and then compete by comparing their players box office score statistics. Every day.

Head2Head baseball builds on this idea. Players manage the teams in real-time using a great looking Swing GUI, and they can start with actual teams from as far back as 1885. As the manager, you've got to make every decision from the starting lineup to pinch hitting. Even if you're not a knowledge seeking sabermatician, this looks like a great app.

 

 

Home: www.cellspark.com

On Colin Mummery's CellSpark web site there's an impressive collection of tools, components, and apps he's developed over the years. CellSpark is a tool for creating tiny flash-like animations for J2ME enabled devices, like cell phones. The tool generates a compact animation data file that gets combined with a 7Kbyte player. There's extra support for creating mini-presentations, mini-animations, and karaoke. That's right, CellSpark makes it easy to build MIDlets that let users sing along with their phones. Check out below for some inline applets (yes, a first for Swing Sightings!).

 

 

 

Home: www.ej-technologies.com/products/install4j/overview.html

ej-technologies is a small company in Munich Germany that makes a suite of software engineering tools written in the Java programming language. We covered their profiling product back in Swing Sightings #9, and this time we're featuring their equally good looking (Alloy Look and Feel from Incors) installer generator.

Install4J generates native installers as well as support for Mac/Win32 and Linux native desktop integration features. For Linux that includes generating RPM and .desktop files.

 

 

Home: panda-igs.joyjoy.net/java/gGo

Go is an ancient board game, very common in Japan, China and Korea. If you guessed that gGO is just a simple realization of this board game in the Java programming language (I did) you're in for a big surprise. It's a Go board, a Simple Game Format (SGF) editor, a client for the Internet Go Server, and an interface for playing with GNU Go. It's web started, looks slick, and available for Linux, Windows, OSX, even OS/2. And it's free. Thanks to Peter Strempel for alerting us to gGo..

 

Home Page: www.yourkit.com

The folks from YourKit LLC sent us a note about their Memory Profiler product which sports a very clean looking GUI.

Did we notice that the screenshots all seem to feature the tool being applied to a Swing application? Did this make us feel a little guilty? Do we own stock in companies that manufacture computer memory? All very good questions which the editorial staff at the Swing Connection has decided to ignore in favor of providing you with a brief description of this product. It's a tool for heap browsing and memory leak detection that bases its analysis on memory "snapshots" rather than a detailed log of JVM object allocation events.

Interestingly the YourKit folks pointed out that it "supports transparent deobfuscation of obfuscated production code".

 

 

Home: horstmann.com/violet

Violet is a free UML editor written in the Java programming language and released under the GNU Public License. The author, Cay Horstman, who's a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science at San Jose State University, explained the origins of Violet like this: "I wrote Violet for my students who were overwhelmed by the functionality and/or price of Rational Rose, and it has since been popular with other students and instructors. I couldn't have done it without Swing. If you look inside the (GPL) source, you'll find a really nifty application of Swing long-term bean persistence." Kind words like that made more than one day over at Swing central.

And in case you're wondering, VIOLET is the "Very Intuitive Object Layout Editing Tool".

Home: www.radioexplorer.com.ru

Dmitry Nefedov was kind enough to send us a pointer to his just-released Radio Explorer app. It's a graphic viewer for international shortwave broadcasting schedules (HFCC and ILGRadio). The explorer incorporates a Swing TreeTable, Gantt Charts, JavaHelp, and the Kunstoff Look and Feel. Dmitry pointed out one interesting feature you should look for if you're giving the app a test spin - he generates PNG images in memory and includes them in HTML tooltips. We haven't seen that before!

 

 

Home: www.javaway.com

Javelin is an desktop app for marketing people. You might want to call one over now, to have a look at the screenshots over your shoulder. Javelin was developed by a company just down the street from here (here is Santa Clara CA) called Javaway. They describe their application like this: "The Javelin Feedback Management platform is a comprehensive solution that supports an effective, collaborative environment throughout the feedback lifecycle." The Javaway web site even includes a case study based on Javelin use at a company called Sun Microsystems. Small world!

 

 

Home: jdbcmanager.sourceforge.net

JDBC Explorer is an open source front-end for Data Base Management Systems that supports visualization and editing (if the corresponding JDBC driver supports ResultSets). Any JDBC database is supported, in the screenshots below you can see the app in action browsing MySQL, MS SQL Server 2000, SAP DB - Ver.7.3.

Francisco Morero who's the lead developer, summed up the project's capabilities like this:

• Perform SQL statements against the DBMS
• Alter (update, append & delete) data stored in data base tables
• Alter table structure (add, delete change fields)
• Create new tables, Delete Tables
• Create indexes and relations
• View relations an tables structures in an Entity Relation Model diagram
• Create, save and retrieve Entity-Relation Diagrams
• Inspect Stored Procedures
• Inspect User Defined Types
• Create data bases (catalogs) from scratch

 

 

 

Home: www.omnicore.com

CodeGuide is a fast good-looking commercial Java IDE from Omnicore in Karlsruhe, Germany. It's hard to believe we haven't covered it in this column before - they've just released version 6.0 and the first version came out back in March 1999. CodeGuide supports all the features developers for the Java platform are sure to appreciate — like on-they-fly compilation, refactoring, project management, and so on. We were reminded that it was about time to include CodeGuide in Swing Sightings by Simon Davis who wrote:

"CodeGuide is a fantastic Java Editor, it's real strength is that it compiles code and shows errors as you type. This makes for a very fast editor that's ideal for everyone especially those who are new to Java. In addition it has all the usual features you would expect - syntax coloring, code completion, pop-up api method/variable list etc. It's written with Swing and a great example of what can be achieved. CodeGuide is currently version 6; 7 will support release 1.5 very soon."

 

 

Home: www.brunswickwdi.com

This product comes from WDI, a division of Brunswick New Technologies. The division's mission statement begins: "WDI is dedicated to creating bleeding edge, platform-independent software ...". WDI has an open source product called Business Integration Engine BIE. Their BIE Map Builder is a visual tool for generating XSL transforms. The resulting maps are used in BIE to perform translations on business documents as they pass through BIE's business process (workflow) engine.

 

 

Home Pages:

• mycgiserver.com/~jsarmis/java_area/java_area.html
• www.georgetown.edu/users/swartzd/soft.html
• www.reed.edu/~mcphailb

Recently we received an email from Sarmis Bulau about a web started version of MineSweeper he'd created called JMineSweeper. It's a particularly good example of the venerable Metal look and feel - he's even used Metal to decorate the top level windows!

I happened to look up JMineSweeper on Google (who needs URLs) and ran into a different JMineSweeper. This one was written a few years ago Dave Swartz and based on what Google reported, is popular with OSX users. I also bumped into Brandon McPhail's JMine applet.

Are there more MineSweeper apps out there? They're hard to miss. For example: Peter Buettner's MineSweeper, Umberto Marzo's 1997 JVMines applet and on and on.

JMineSweeper - Dave Swartz
JMine
JMineSweeper - Sarmis Bulau