Michael Hasselmann and Jon Nordby are both giving talks about the Maliit input method framework, as seen on the N9. We are eager to find customers who need our help to integrate and improve this only real choice for an open-source on-screen keyboard. So we hope that some people of influence take the opportunity to get to know the project and its excellent developers.

Jens Georg is also giving a talk about Rygel, used in the N9 to support UPnP and DLNA. For German speakers, there are already video and slides online of a recent talk that Jens did about Rygel in Berlin for Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden. I was amused to discover that DLNA had specified themselves into a situation where a minimum certified server and a minimum certified receiver were only able to share a small resolution JPEG format. Apparently it’s getting better, and Rygel can deal with it all.

I also changed it from using a lang= token in the URL to using GWT’s regular locale= query value, re-simplifying much of my previous Online Glom code to support translations.

Now that I see how each new translation adds another set of gwt-java-to-javascript permutations to the already-slow build, so it now builds 41 permutations, I might switch later from the Constants to the Messages technique for GWT translation, because I don’t think that string lookup will be a big performance problem.

At least on Ubuntu, it’s now easy to build and test gwt-glom. You can just do:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:openismus-team/openismus-glom-unstable
$ sudo apt-get install default-jdk maven2 libjava-libglom-java glom-utils
$ git clone git://gitorious.org/online-glom/gwt-glom.git
$ cd gwt-glom
$ mvn gwt:run

This opens the GWT Development Mode GUI, which serves gwt-glom via jetty and lets you see it in your browser.

Chrome is the most likely to have the gwt plugin that you need for development mode, though it’s available for some versions of Firefox.

How we made it this easy

GWT projects, like other Java projects, typically use maven (mvn) for their build system. maven is nothing like autotools.

Maven usually downloads dependencies automatically, either from the central maven repository, from some (maybe private) other maven repository that you specify. This sounds unstable, but you specify exact version numbers, so you can be sure that your project will continue to build. So maven doesn’t have the separation of building and packaging that I’m used to in the C/C++/autotools world. It feels odd to me, but I’m going with the flow.

However, java-libglom uses JNI to provide a Java API around a C++ (libglom) API, so it uses both Java (architecture-independent) and C++ (compiled and linked for particular architectures).

java-libglom installs a native shared libary. We packaged that for Ubuntu in our Glom PPA (stable and unstable) as libjava-libglom-java so you can install it easily.

java-libglom also creates .pom and .jar files (for the API, the sources, and the javadoc). These are in the central maven repository so maven can just download the .jar.

That libjava-libglom-java Ubuntu package also installs the .pom and .jar files that maven needs, but those are only useful for mvn-debian, which is apparently only useful for building other Debian/Ubuntu packages. There is no apparently no way to using mvn-debian’s local repository while also using the central maven repository for other stuff.

Java with autotools

By the way, java-libglom uses autotools, although the autotools Java support is barely useful and limiting, so we have custom rules for most stuff. However, autotools does let us generate the Java and C++ files from swig, and build the native shared library. That seemed harder to do with maven, though maven would have made it easier to deal with the generated Java code.

I do like how maven just defaults to using your .java files, and test ,java files properly if you put them in the correct places. For instance, see the maven quickstart project.

There is now a language drop-down list at the top-right, and that is shown in the URL as, for instance, &lang=de (I might change that to locale instead of lang). Choosing a different language will change the table titles, field titles, group titles, etc, to the chosen language.

I have deployed that to the Online Glom test server. For instance:

I have not yet done the same for the translatable strings that are in gwt-glom’s Java source code, such as “Search”, and the “Open” and “Details” buttons. I’m not much looking forward to the awkward way that it should apparently be done. gettext’s _() macro is much cleaner.

Meyah is turning out to be just as friendly, energetic and curious as Liam. She’ll be walking soon. This is her second week in the creche, which will be good for her, but feels strange for us.

Liam wants to learn about everything and surprises me every few weeks with his sudden advances. Last week he learned how to play chess though a month before he would not have had the patience.

Raising two kids isn’t easy at times, but it’s the whole point of my life now and nothing has ever made me so happy.

I’m proud of myself, but I can’t help feeling that it needed far too many code changes, in far too many interconnected classes, just to add a text box in the browser and then use the resulting text to slightly change a method call on the server. I took the time to write a detailed ChangeLog/commit-message just to be sure that I understood what was happening.

This is apparently how things are in the land of Java. In its defence, there are reasons for the abstractions and separations. For instance, OnlineGlom code does the GWT thing of allowing for different View implementations for different clients, such as mobile or desktop, but it only has one type of Views for now. It also uses a Model/View/Presenter architecture, via its Activities, which makes it possible to test more code logic without getting the UI involved. And there’s the Places idea, which maps history tokens (parts of URLs) to Activities and vice-versa.

I wish there were some way to have the useful architecture without the repetitive code that gets in the way of the interesting stuff.

I can now type “make examples_export_po” to export .po files and “make examples_import_po” to read the improved translations back into the Glom example files.

I put the .po files in Glom’s git repository, hoping that people will translate them, and maybe add more .po files. I wonder if these could even show up on Glom’s l10n.gnome.org page. Update: They do show up there now, thanks to Claude Paroz, and we already have some translations.

The Film Production Manager example is a fairly good example of the complex systems that Glom can support, without SQL and without programming.

Here’s a screenshot of the same thing in the desktop UI.

I have also deployed my old Debian Repository Analyzer, full of real data, so you can get a feel for navigating around the related records. I spent lots of time updating that for the latest python-apt API and libgda (with python) APIs, and it’s now in a gitorious project. Many thanks to Michael Vogt for his help with python-apt.

Now that David King has packaged java-libglom (as libjava-libglom-java) for Ubuntu Oneiric in the Openismus PPA, it’s really easy to work with the gwt-glom code on that distro.

What’s Next

This proves that GWT was a sane choice, though development has not been as quick as I’d hoped . But I don’t think a generic framework can ever be developed as rapidly as most data-driven web sites that start as quick hacks. The difficulties have shown that I was right to focus on a restricted set of functionality at first. You can get a sense of how development has progressed by looking at the gwt-glom commit log, though there’s lots of work in java-libglom too.

I now plan to take the development further myself. That’s a nice way to get more deeply reacquainted with Java and web development. It’s easier to hack on the project at this stage, before it gets huge, rather than trying to do this from scratch. Ben Konrath has already made the large architectural decisions so that I don’t have to. I’m even enjoying Eclipse, which is a much more pleasant experience with Java than with C++. Well, using the Eclipse IDE is still like shopping in a flea market but with Java you will quickly find useful things.

I plan to do things roughly in this order:

• Add the Quick Find feature, for searching. Update: Done
• Add report generation.
• Add print layout printing.
• Maybe investigate how to make theming via CSS easier.
• Allow editing of data. This will be a big task.

At the same time, I will play with avoiding the need for java-libglom’s JNI binding to the libglom C++ library. I would need to reimplement Glom document parsing in Java, but that would be easy as it’s just XML. But I would also need some replacement for GdaSqlBuilder, to build SQL queries without manually concatenating and escaping text.

As always, I’m proud of our Maliit developers at Openismus. We believe that excellent developers must be communicators, or their work is for nothing. That log shows why.