Owner: Java/J2EE, Java Game Development blog URL:http://www.javazing.com/ Join Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 06:22:11 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Javazing.com is a personal blog on internet, programming, software, Java and many other programming-related things. Site statistics:Click here
Day 1 2007-03-16 22:13:30 So, I have just come across a Cas’s “The Alien Flux Development Diary”. And as he and his team are the creators of LWJGL engine, and as I am using it to write my next 2D game I thought maybe I should start my diary of my own.
I am planning to write a simple, so-called ‘casual’ game – a remake of ‘Dr.WEB’ game. I really loved that game; I played it on ‘dandy’ game console (a Chinese clone of NES console). Moreover, I want to use Java.
I like Java. I have thought a lot about the technologies to use, I know many languages, platforms and tools. It is really a tough task to make a choice, a right choice. However, after a long and painful thinking I had a small set:
1. BlitzMax
2. C/C++ with multiplatform library (GTK, SDL or Torque)
3. Java (OpenGL binding)
BlitzMax
Blitzmax is great for a newbie game developer, who has started writing some scripts. It has a fairly small price (~80 dollars), a large community and an as a result many libraries. This is wonderful. What I
Cool effects Cool Me Off 2007-03-03 13:49:31 Today I have come across a nice Tetris game Culitrs written in Java. It is based on a LWJGL library – a Java framework for game development. The game is free and looks pretty cool, nice visuals. There is only one thing – you cannot play the game.
This “cool” effect shows the transparent block at the bottom of the game field:
So you know where the block will be when you hit the ‘down’ button.
Unfortunately, the game is unplayable with this ‘cool’ effect. It distracts you and you just do not feel the field. This happens very often. The developers add something ‘cool’, just because it looked cool to them or required some significant development time. However, it adds no value or kills the product (like in this case).
A Few Words on Synth 2007-02-23 10:45:11 If you are into heavy server-side development, you probably do not pay much attention at other Java features, such as GUI. However, I like to dig everything around this great language and the platform. Some time ago, I came across “Synth” thing in Java. This is a way to customize and change look’n feel of your Swing application with no ugly code tweaks, but with a single XML file, which is great for designers and other not-programming folks.
I played with it for some time, came across some hard to find and fix issues, read about exciting and promising Synth features in JDK 6 and left it for the future.
The future is now but still there is not so much information on the subject and that is surprising. With the ‘new’ JDK 6, I hoped there would be more information, more tutorials; people would start looking at it. However, unfortunately the only information about Synth I can find on Google dates back to 2005. Strange.
Well, maybe today I will look into it again and try to get Read more:Words
Hot Water 2007-02-22 17:40:17 Check out how this guy managed to get hot water. Pretty smart I think.
List of Countries for Java Application 2007-02-22 14:10:53 No more, no less: the list of countries for your resource bundle file:
Show List
#---------------
# Countries
#---------------
country.afghanistan = Afghanistan
country.akrotiri = Akrotiri
country.albania = Albania
country.algeria = Algeria
country.americansamoa = American Samoa
country.andorra = Andorra
country.angola = Angola
country.anguilla = Anguilla
country.antarctica = Antarctica
country.antiguaandbarbuda = Antigua and Barbuda
country.arcticocean = Arctic Ocean
country.argentina = Argentina
country.armenia = Armenia
country.aruba = Aruba
country.ashmoreandcartierislands = Ashmore and Cartier Islands
country.atlanticocean = Atlantic Ocean
country.australia = Australia
country.austria = Austria
country.azerbaijan = Azerbaijan
country.bahamas.the = Bahamas, The
country.bahrain = Bahrain
country.bakerisland = Baker Island
country.bangladesh = Bangladesh
country.barbados = Barbados
country.bassasdaindia = Bassas da India
country.belarus = Belarus
country.belgium = Belgium
country.b Read more:Application
, Java Application
A Few Words On PHP 2007-02-22 13:53:27 I know some Java programmers consider PHP to be a simple language for simple solutions. But the number of PHP powered sites is really large. PHP powered content management systems (CMS) have great look and exciting features. When you write in plain PHP without using any of the PHP frameworks, it sucks. It really does. You have to split the page in a few ‘tiles’, then include this pages in every page, to have the same header and footer for example. You also do not have a ‘cross-application’ context, so you cannot use in-memory cache as much as we do it in Java applications.
I also like the idea of tags in Java. Do not know whether it is a Java invention or not. Tags are great and can be of great help and a great time and money save for many projects. In order to have something like tags in PHP you have to write a function that will print the html in an old servlet style. It sucks. I also do not understand why there is no database connection caching in PHP. I asked my friend, Read more:Words
Hibernate 3 Annotations 2007-02-12 11:33:15 In the recent versions of Hibernate
, a new, more elegant approach (other than traditional database mappings that are defined in a set of XML mapping files) has emerged, based on Java 5 annotations. Using the new Hibernate Annotations
library, you can dispense once and for all with your old mapping files--everything is defined as, you guessed it--annotations directly embedded in the Java classes.
read more...
“Top 19″ best practices for J2EE 2007-02-12 11:19:49 The list of the best of the best Java EE practices can be found at IBM web site:
1. Always use MVC.
2. Don't reinvent the wheel.
3. Apply automated unit tests and test harnesses at every layer.
4. Develop to the specifications, not the application server.
5. Plan for using Java EE security from Day One.
6. Build what you know.
7. Always use session facades whenever you use EJB components.
8. Use stateless session beans instead of stateful session beans.
9. Use container-managed transactions.
10. Prefer JSPs as your first choice of presentation technology.
11. When using HttpSessions, store only as much state as you need for the current business transaction and no more.
12. Take advantage of application server features that do not require your code to be modified.
13. Play nice within existing environments.
14. Embrace the qualities of service provided by the application server environment.
15. Embrace Java EE, don't fake it.
16. Plan for vers Read more:ldquo
List of 505 Articles Submission Sites 2007-02-12 10:23:17 If you wish to promote your web site, tell about your new software, some merchandise or a service of some kind, you may write an article and submit it to the article
archive sites. I do not think it will bring you happy customers right away, but it can be good for the search engines from the SEO perspective.
List of 505 ArticlesSubmissionSites
Google and Search Problems 2007-03-18 13:06:23 Today my friend and I were looking for software that could make a trialware version of our program. We have lost the source code of the program as it was written about 3 years ago and we cannot use popular software protection systems or cut some program’s features to make a limited demo version.
We need a program that will take our executable, perform some voodoo magic and give us back an executable that will function on the user’s machine for say 14 days, or 10 launches or something like that.
While googling we have found no traces of existing of such system. Maybe we do not know exactly how to build a proper search query, as we do not how these systems are called. And I know that there are such programs. I just cannot remember them right now, so will have to search for advice in forums or in a conference.
I thought that there could be probably a big failure of many businesses using their web site and thus search engines as their very important marketing and selling channel. Ther Read more:Google
, Search
Software Development Can Be Fun 2007-03-19 20:10:39 Now the developer has to know a bunch of different technologies, systems and libraries. And each day you start your favorite IDE, HTML editor, XML editor, a couple of utilities along with Outlook Express program and run a server. The computer is as slow as hell and you start cursing the developers and the computer.
I am in the development of the presentation tier for the large contract management application writing some java code, composing some HTML & JSP pages and writing some crazy client-side JS components, writing and fixing long XML and .property files.
We use an excellent Eclipse IDE along with a set of plug-ins known as MyEclipse. This is a very powerful system, however most of time (I mean always) the only plug-in we use is the nice syntax highlighting of JSP, JS & XML files.
Once I asked the colleague to help me fix some annoying bug in JSP code. He logged in to my server, opened the page in IE, right-clicked it and opened the HTML source in a notepad. No, it was no Read more:Software
, Development
, Software Development
First Day of Game Development 2007-03-19 22:40:44 Today I have suddenly realized that I do already have everything to start writing a game. There is a basic scene manager, sprites, particles in my engine. With the help from the guys in LWJGL IRC channel, I managed to plug Mappy library to LWJGL and now it is really simple to have an animated tiled map. For music and sound, I would probably take Audiere library, as it is free though Windows only. Therefore, today is the first day of the GAME DEVELOPMENT Read more:First
, Development
, First Day
, Game Development
Search Engine Friendly URLs for Java Web Application 2007-03-28 18:49:00 Static and Dynamic URLs
Any web-application has static and dynamic resources. As the names imply static resources are those that are never changed.
For example, html pages with no dynamic data, static download files etc.
Dynamic resources are those that can change their content from time to time: html pages that contain dynamic data (such as results of search queries), dynamic reports, download files that may change their content depending on the visitor’s preference and so on.
Usually we may easily distinguish static and dynamic URLs:
http://www.mysite.com/pictureOfMyDog.jsp - static URL.
http://www.mysite.com/picture.jsp?id=234&operation=show - dynamic URL.
URLs and SearchEngine
s
Search engines like static URLs. When the search engine spider comes across a dynamic URL it will or will not (may and may not) follow it. Depending on the internal algorithms, the search engine will choose the most optimal way to go.
If your site is popular and the search engine knows about i Read more:Friendly
, Application
, Search Engine
, Web Application
Java Applets 2007-04-02 16:20:06 Paul Graham says:
The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that seem to outsiders to be fine, responsible choices and yet, like Windows in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. Java applets were probably the most spectacular example. This was supposed to be the new way of delivering applications. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups who believed that.
That’s sad but true. The platform that could have become dominant for online in-browser application was flashed down the toliet. And still with Java 6 Java applets look like hacks in the browser, with a long startup time, freezing the browser and so on.
It’s a pity.
Creating a Distribution Package of Your Java Application 2007-04-05 12:08:16 Say, you have written a Java application and now it is time to create windows installer package to upload it to your site so that anybody could download it, run and enjoy your proggy. Of course, one can distribute a plain JAR file, but not all users will be able to start it successfully.
It is better to give them a normal plain installer package that they know how to run through the wizard. You may also want to bundle a JRE with your application so your program will run on every machine with no JRE installed. I would also advise obfuscate your code, thus, no evil hacker could get your code too easily. It also makes sense to wrap your Java application in a regular windows executable (EXE) file.
You will need the following tools and libraries that are distributed free of charge:
1. Ant tool.
2. NSIS: a scriptable win32 installer/uninstaller system.
3. ProGuard: java shrinker, optimizer, and obfuscator.
4. Launch4j: Cross-platform Java executable wrapper for creating lightweight Windows n Read more:Creating
, Application
Protect Your Contact Form against Spammers 2007-04-06 20:26:53 ‘Contact Us’ page
How a user can contact the administration of a web site? Usually every web site has a ‘contact us’ page with the contact details of people in charge. Moreover, this is not really convenient. A user has to start his mail client, to make sure the address of the recipient is correct, [...] Read more:Protect
, against
Java 3D Application in JavaScript (Irrlicht & Jirr) 2007-04-24 12:52:35 With the new features of Java 1.6 it is incredibly easy to add scripting capabilities to your programs. By using JavaScript
you do not have to recompile your application every time you change something, also JavaScript is much easier especially for those new to Java.
Check out the way we implement an Irrlicht application in JavaScript. [...] Read more:Application
Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid 2007-05-05 13:59:45 Daniel from Daily Blog Tips has a list of common web mistakes. Some of the rules are useful, some are a little bit outdated, some are wrong, I guess.
I would like to add one more rule: do not use java applets, as they are slow and can freeze the browser.
In addition, I [...] Read more:Avoid
, Web Design
An Idea of an Online Service: CV Builder 2007-05-20 02:18:45 At the moment I am looking for a job as a java programmer here, in Sydney. I still have not found a job, only settled some interviews with the employers: two investments banks, a telephone company and a telecommunication entertainment company.
As a result I came up with an interesting idea of an online service [...] Read more:Service
, Builder
Adwords Mistakes 2007-05-20 03:29:00 Once in a while I come across funny mistakes and errors in Google Adwords
. Now it’s high time to start collecting them:
And when you click the ad:
I am just wondering who’s paying for the mistake
Fake it! 2007-07-13 23:58:13 Sometimes you need test data to... test some class or jsp page. Here is the java class that can be of help to someone.
PLAIN TEXT
JAVA:
import org.apache.commons.lang.RandomStringUtils;
import org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils;
import org.apache.commons.lang.math.RandomUtils;
public class Fake {
public static String getAddress() {
String str = RandomStringUtils.randomNumeric(2) + "/"
+ [...]
RIA’s war 2007-08-02 06:53:01 Isn’t this me-too RIA buzz a little bit naive? A long time ago Java “invented” applets - a great idea for RIA that has gracefully failed. Flash has taken the seat. MS’s silverlight is not getting developers anywhere for too many reasons. JavaFX requires the latest Java JVM installed on the user’s computer. I believe [...]
Interview at Google 2007-08-14 07:59:57 A really detailed description of the Google
hiring procedures, a great post:
A few months ago I received an e-mail from a recruiter at Google asking for an opportunity to talk to me about available development positions. Needless to say, I was pretty excited. I’m fairly happy in my current job, but–it’s GOOGLE. You don’t say no to an interview opportunity at Google.
Weird… 2007-08-19 02:31:56 We almost had a fight at work, some people think she is rotating counterclockwise. I can see her rotating both ways, mostly clockwise. This is weird&hellip
;
Read more:Weird
Get 2,5 Million People Watch Your Ad Again and Again 2007-09-18 05:45:32 This is a short freaky video with a stupid crazy song. And I like it And 2,3 million people like it as well. And basically it is an ad of a software development company. There is a banner in the end of the video. Now that’s what I call an excellent marketing idea. I don’t know how many sales they managed to get but to my understanding it should not be a bad year for them indeed.
Read more:Again
Wikipedia Killed Programmer’s Day 2007-09-16 03:03:39 13 September is a Programmer
’s Day - an informal celebration of the 256th day of the year (256 is a power of two, i.e. 2^8=256). Unfortunately wikipedia has deleted the page of this holiday for the reason “Imaginary/joke holiday.” What a shame Read more:Wikipedia
, Killed
Installing 3DMax 7 on Windows Vista (acge16.dll problem) 2007-12-20 01:13:41 After successful installation of 3DMax 7 on WindowsVista
the application doesn’t start with the message - ‘couldn’t locate acge16.dll’. All you have to do is to copy all DLL files from ‘C:Program FilesCommon FilesAutodesk Shared’ to the location of your 3DMax installation, for example to ‘C:3dmax. After this simple procedure 3DMax works on Vista with no problems. Read more:Windows Vista
Java Geek Humor 2008-03-10 22:23:33 I’ve come across a really funny dialog here:
- I am looking for a downloadable java written practical test. We are in the process of employing some new staff and we need a test of some sorts to gauge the skills.
- Hey pls let me know ur company name….
So that I can also apply…
- Upon [...] Read more:Geek
, Humor
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