Chaotic Java

I wrote about GWT’s lack of drag and drop a long time ago, and since then have done many things instead of making a generic drag-drop mechanism as promised. Luckily, some other people have, and it seems like their solution is quite good and solves a wide array of drag-drop problems.

Since it might be interesting to some, this post will be about how a generic draggable component can be written. I’ve coded a draggable panel at the time to help make any Widget into a draggable version of itself, and I’ll describe how that was done. Warning: This is a step by step recipe on how to make a draggable widget of your own. If you’re just looking for code examples or a library, you’d better take a look at the previously mentioned project‘s code and binaries. Continue reading »

I’ve been working with GWT (Google’s Web Toolkit) a bit recently, and I must first say it’s an amazing tool. It does have some downfalls, like requiring you to use J2SE 1.4 syntax, so no enum or generics when developing with GWT.. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from using the Java SE 5 or 6 framework, so concurrency and all the other goodies are still there (to be used on the server side, obviously).

And that’s just unfortunate, because I really got used to using enums! Still, not having the syntax is not going to stop me. After all, enums in Java are eventually translated into classes, so I can just write my own GWT-compatible Enum-class. Continue reading »

Regarding my previous rant, I am still waiting for GWT to be released on the Mac (with hosted mode, that is), and until that happens I am toying around with it in very slow pace. However, one issue is semi-resolved for me as I read this article from Nub Games. Apparently, there’s an easy way to implement drag and drop in GWT, using mostly out-of-the-box tools provided by the framework and the rest is standard code that can be generified to an almost invisible level.

I hope that soon some examples on my part would be available, but for now I can’t use the Windows computer for GWT toying, and as for the Mac.. We’ll have to wait for Google to make their move. Regarding that, Scott Blum of Google asked if anyone who’s a Safari ninja (in code, not usage) could send him an email so that this situation could be fixed.