Status

SWT web installer

SWT web installer is almost ready to be released.
I tested it and wrote the documentation. It just needs the final touches.
I think it will be released during this week as version 1.0 beta.
License is LGPL 3.0.

ISQL

I made a library of ISQL, which I will release as soon as possible.
ISQL can be actually using separately from Matrex.
It is just to call a function with, as parameters, the SQL query and the input and output arrays.
I think it can be very interesting for people that wants to use SQL on arrays in memory.
Also in this case the license will be GPL 3.0-

Matrex

There will be a version 1.3 of Matrex.
The idea is to include in this version the last changes made to the source code of Matrex:

• new classloader and plugins structure
• SWT web installer to install SWT from internet
• separated ISQL library

Also, the 2D charts will be updated and new Matrex functions will be added, thanks to the new version of the commons math library .


I'm also working to plan version 2.0 of Matrex. I tested an example of RMI callbacks and I've found that it works very well. I will soon publish a new document about the future Matrex Client/Server architecture.

The SWT Web Installer

You wrote this nice SWT application and you want to release it.
And you realized it is not so easy, especially if the user has to install it himself.
Yes, because there is a different SWT version for each platform: a version for Windows, a version for Mac OSX, a version for Linux... not only, but also different versions for 32 and 64 bits.
What you do? You build a setup file for your application for each platform?

With these thoughts, I wrote a library that does the job for you.
It is called OS dependent installer (osdepinstaller).
You call it from your installer or from your application and it installs the right SWT version for the platform where your application is installed.

It works in this way:

• it loads from the internet a file containing a list of links to download the SWT library from, one for each platform.
  
• It checks the platform in which it is installed (two properties, os.type and os.arch).
• it gets the link for that platform
• it downloads the SWT library (it is a zip file)
  
• it unzips the SWT library in a specific directory

If something goes wrong (for example the platform was not found in the list of links), osdepinstaller offers other solutions to the user.
For example if the automatic choice of the platform does not work, the user is asked to do the choice manually.

A principle of osdepinstaller is to give all the information about what it is doing. In this way the user can continue manually if for some reason the library is not able to continue.

Since osdepinstaller cannot work without internet, and it can happen that the internet can be accessed only through a firewall or a proxy, the system checks with the user if there is a proxy and, in this case, if the proxy needs authorization.

To get data from the user and to show the status osdepinstaller uses by default the console (since it is normal that your application does not have a GUI until osdepinstaller has finished), but it can be easily adapted to other solutions.

Also, osdepinstaller is not only for SWT: it can be used for any library the is platform dependent.

Osdepinstaller is still in test, but you can download a test version and check the code.

I will use osdepinstaller to let the user install SWT with the generic installer of Matrex.

Matrex 1.2 for MacOSX alternative setup

I've got some one reporting me that the Matrex 1.2 version for Mac OSX does not install perfectly on all Macs.
The problem is that sometimes after the setup Matrex does not look like an application but like a simple java folder.
Surely you can open a terminal and run the shell script (the batch file) from there, but this is not really an intuitive way of running it!

I use IzPack to install my software and IzPack claims to be able to install also on Mac OSX, even if from some messages in mailing lists it seems that there could be some problems.

I tried to see what I can do.

First I will modify the shell script so that it can be called from everywhere (an initial statement to let it use the current directory as starting directory).
Then I will update Izpack to the last version (3.11).

But one thing that I would really like to do is to create a MacOSX application bundle containing the Matrex files.
The application bundle is the natural way applications are installed on MacOSX.
To do this you need:

• a .icns file, that contains the application icon.
  
• a way to generate a .dmg file, which is an autoinstalling disk image containing the application bundle.
  

There is no way, as far as I know, to generate .icns and .dmg files outside MacOSX.

So, if someone has a Mac and wants to help me to build this application bundle and to test it, can he please let me know?