ToolBarWithMenu component

The SWT ToolBar component has a minor problem: when there is no space enough to show all the buttons contained in the ToolBar, it just shows the first ones.
It is true that the SWT.WRAP property partially fixes the problem wrapping the buttons in two or more lines, but this does not work in some platforms (e.g. Linux) in which the property is ignored.
This can be a problem, because the user of the application can be completely unaware of the buttons that are not displayed.
I have seen other graphical libraries solve this problem adding an additional button at the end of the toolbar. This button when clicked shows a menu with the missing buttons.
So I adopted the same logic in SWT: I made a class called ToolBarWithMenu
, which adds a button at the start of the toolbar. The button has a menu showing the buttons that are not displayed in the toolbar because there is no space. Here is an example in Matrex:


Clicking on one of the menu items has the same effect as clicking on the related toolbar button.
It works as expected also for a button with an attached menu, if the button's selection listener that shows the menu implements the IHasMenu interface.

Matrex on MacOSX

Matrex uses the SWT library for its GUI. SWT uses the native GUI of the platform. The current version of Matrex, 1.3, uses SWT 3.4.
On MacOSX SWT 3.4 is based on Carbon, which is only 32 bits.
So Matrex 1.3 on MacOSX does not work using Java 1.6 (Java 6), which is only 64 bits and therefore not compatible with Carbon.
If you want to use Matrex 1.3 in MacOSX please either:

• run it with Java 1.5 (Java 5) instead of Java 1.6
• try the beta version of SWT 3.5 for Cocoa 64 bits. Download the zip file and unzip it in the /swt directory, where is the directory where you installed Matrex.
  

The following is the description of the SWT 3.4 problem written by the SWT developers:

SWT cannot be used with OS X JRE version 1.6 (Mac OSX only)

OS X JRE version 1.6 assumes that pointers have a size of 64 bits, but SWT's Carbon port only uses 32-bit pointers, so SWT and Eclipse cannot be used with OS X JRE version 1.6. The workaround is to use an earlier supported version of the OS X JRE.

Updated Matrex adapter to Scilab

The Matrex adapter to Scilab has been updated for Matrex 1.3.5.
The adapter has been tested with Scilab 5.1.

The adapter contains a special function template that calls Scilab functions to calculate Matrex functions.
Input matrices and parameters of the Matrex function are passed to the related Scilab functions, which is calculated. The result of the Scilab function is passed back to Matrex as output matrices of the Matrex function.

More information can be found in the documentation included in the Scilab adapter setup.

New Matrex adapter to Groovy

I released in these days the new Matrex adapter to the Groovy language.
This follows the two adapters to Jython (integrated in Matrex) and to JRuby.
This adapter is good:

• for fast prototyping and test of function templates
  
• to write more compact code than in Java
  
• to use features, for example closures, that are not available in Java

Like the other language adapters it used in this way:

1. create a Groovy script with the code for the function template
2. create the function template definition
3. use the function template to create functions in Matrex projects

More information can be found in the documentation included in the Groovy adapter setup.