jsPgnViewer & stuff

A release inspired by patches from Kent Smotherman again. The feature changes are

• Showing comments configurable with an option
• Showing comments configurable with a button
• More PGN tags are displayed for the game
• Empty tags not producing visuals anymore
• Moves pane same height as board and autoflow auto
• Small Safari bugs squashed

There has not been any news for a week and a half now. I’ll try to give an update on the project and my doings. As the project applications were private then a few have seen the initial roadmap. Anyways for Week IV the main artefact was a concrete development roadmap.

This weekend I had the chance of meeting my mentor IRL. This is something that most of the students cannot do. We’re separated by 200km and we plan to meet once a month. We laid down a rough roadmap and a feature set. We’ve been bouncing it back and forth now for couple of days. I just released the current result to my Eclipse wiki page. We we’re able to lay down the

• General architecture outline
• Feature set
• Deliverables
• In detail roadmap for the next 2 weeks

Anyways it has been a non-coding week. I received my BSc a week ago and during the following days I’ll attend the graduation ceremony & party:).

I’m almost through with the Producing Open Source Software. The 6th-9th chapters have been a great read. I hope the rest is just as new and interesting as these.

Finally a feature release. Mainly thanks to a chess enthusiast and software developer Kent Smotherman. The impatient ones check out the demo and others learn about the changes.

Bugfixe(s)/Change(s)

• Safari support – thanks to Kent Smotherman
• RAV (Recursive Annotation Variations) suppor – by Kent Smotherman
• Comments support – by Kent Smotherman
• Not extracting Round info due to tyopo – by Kent Smotherman
• New chess set – by Kent Smotherman
• Default images moved from ‘./img’ to ‘.img/default’. Other folders in ‘./img/’ are for different sets and still configurable with ‘imagePrefix’.
• New configuration options
  • commentFont, commentFontSize, commentFontColor
  • boardSize, squareSize
  • blackSqColor, whiteSqColor
  • movesPaneWidth – this was present but undocumented before
  • See online docs for details
  • See the updated demo page for details

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.5 and to the issues list to add feature requests.

PS. A game library using the jsPgnViewer – The Nebraska Chess League

To get the feel of plugins in Eclipse I decided to write a minimal plugin. The code is far from clean and I guess breaks every best practise out there But through this mini project I was able to get a gist of what developing plugins for Eclipse is.

As I was converting my small app to Eclipse there were many problems I had to solve. Like how to make a View and show it . This is where the large Eclipse plugin database comes in hand. I used the QuickREx plugin to see how to get a View up. Secondly I wanted to output text to the Eclipse console view. Java Platform Logging Support plugin to the rescue.

With other application the real info on how to use the API is hidden hopefully at least in the unit tests. In an application of this level it is hidden in the open-source plugins. Great resource.

Other resource I found useful was the Eclipse anonymous CVS access. I did not understand why my Text (SWT Widget) was not appearing on a ViewPart (Eclipse Widget). I checked the ViewCvs of Eclipse and saw the org.eclipse.ui.forms.examples module there. It actually contained exactly what I needed.

I’ve developed applications with Swing before so the SWT behaved in a expected manner. I opened up the SWT widgets graphical list, picked a widget and gave it a try. I don’t like the name scheme in SWT though Grepping just got harder. Lets say I want to know which file contained a textarea. With a Swing application I can grep for JTextArea with SWT I’ll be grepping for Text. Case sensitivity will ease the pain but I use an alias with the -i flag and moreover the other widgets have even more generic names (Browser, Button, Group, List etc.). I know that awt has such names too but I will not be using awt anymore. If somebody wants to compare, then here is the Swing widgets graphical list.

The same app as in previous post but with Eclipse/SWT.

Tried out some new Java6 functionality. Ended up with a console to try out different ScriptEngines. Tested with PHP (Quercus) & js (Rhino).

It is again a maintenance release. Biggest change is that the javascript comes in packed form. See post chesspastebin.com update & just stuff for the reasons and size changes. Default is now Dean Edwards’s packer. The release includes also a JSMIN version of the source code and also a fallback unpacked variant. The size of the release is bigger due to including different versions of the same code. I’ll have things figured out by 0.4.

This release is inspired by a comment and serves as a “get unreleased maintenance code out there” . Happy hacking

My military service ended on 1st of June. After 11months I can again plan my own time and spend it where and how I want to. I’ll be posting updates on the projects I’m involved in when I have something to post. Stay tuned.