// May 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // bubble, demo
Removing XmlBeans and Commons-Logging reduced the nifty with all dependencies jar from 4,4 MB to 1,6 MB 
Check it out here
Nifty Project Page at Sourceforge
or get the release here
Have fun =)
// April 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // bubble
Actually I like XmlBeans a lot. Define a XML-Schema (XSD) for your XML-File, throw XmlBeans at it and let it generate some Java classes. Voila. XML-Binding. Validate against the XML-Schema, easily access your XML-File from within Java, etc… XML? Java? Done!
There’s even a Maven Plugin for it, so one can generate the classes on the fly within your build process. Great Stuff!
So why would some half insane person want to removed it?
Well, one drawback is the size of the lib. Because XmlBeans is your Swiss army knife of XML-Java-Binding it is rather large being around 2,6 MB in size. Altough this is not that bad in DSL-century you can still notice it when running a Java Applet or Java Webstart.
Another and somewhat profoundly drawback is, that in a Java Webstart it seems to parse Xml-Files very very slow. I’m not sure what exactly causes this slowdown but from what I grasp this might be a classLoader issue or something. When run localy everything works fine but from within a Webstart Version it runs painfully slow. I’ve tried to pinpoint what causes these issues but had not much luck in doing so.
Now I’ve settled to get rid of XmlBeans and replace it with some simpler form of xml parsing. What I’m currently using is XPP3. Hopefully this will remove the issues. The lib is very small (25 KB) and very fast. The only drawback so far is that I lose the Schema-Validation. I’ll keep the XML-Schema for development and documentation purposes but the actual Loader inside Nifty won’t check against the Schema anymore. Which is a bit sad but something I can’t do anything about at this very moment.
// April 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // bubble
Nifty sourceforge.net project available
Have fun
void
// April 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // bubble
I’m currently preparing the first alpha release of Nifty and moving the source over to sourceforge.net. This means you get access to the source as well as a first release of Nifty to play with.
There’s a new nifty-example.jar on the way too
Stay tuned … more news soon!
// December 16th, 2007 // No Comments » // bubble
Well it works… but as development progresses some, err, bad habits sneak it. There were a lot of features added to nifty in a relative short period of time and some of these features messed up the code as well as internal dependencies (I’m sure you know what I’m talking about…).
One thing I pretty much hate are inheritance dependencies. Sadly I’ve just introduced a fairly big one to manage all the controls in Nifty *sigh*
Well it’s time to get the refactoring hat on and clean up the mess
Btw: If you still need a christmas present (for yourself or some co-worker) I’d higly recommend the book:
“Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code” by Martin Fowler.
This book rocks :> I’ve learned a lot from it.
// November 29th, 2007 // No Comments » // bubble
I am going to use this blog to track development of nifty gui. The “nifty” gui for your java opengl/lwjgl application.
