Java

Three days ago, I posted a design pattern for menubars. While the article was mainly about code clarity and the clumsiness of inner classes, it also contained some remarks concerning performance and naturally this puts me in a put up or shut up situation, even though a performance discussion was not really my intention.

Ok, here is the problem: You are assigned to write a method for a Java based filemanager, that is able to delete an entire directory tree. Sounds like a trivial task, that can easily be solved by a very simple, recursive algorithm, doesn't it? Take a File object. If it is indeed a file, just delete it. If it is a directory, list it's contents and call yourself for every file contained in it. Thats it, 10 minutes of coding and taking the rest of the day off. Money earned easily.

There is this thing about Java GUI programming, that has been irking me for quite a long time. Namely the way, a lot of people tend to write ActionListener routines, which often involves the use of inner classes. I don't really know why inner classes are so popular. Personally, I never liked them, always considered them to be defective by design and generally more helpful in obfuscating code then producing clarity.

For some reason, I seem to be stuck with writing stuff for the MMORPG Yohoho!Puzzle Pirates and that even though I don't actually play that game any longer.
But as things are, there are occasionally support requests for ScenePainter and while I had a little chat about it the other day, it came up, that the original scenetoxml has some issues. Well, here is a new one then: SceneHaul.

When releasing the scenepainter setup utility yesterday, I was, upon notifying people, asked the question of how to actually compile and use threering's nenya library for own projects. Simple question, not so simple answer. Digging through the API can be quite time consuming. Luckily, I remembered having written a quick "tutorial" about the subject earlier this year, I just never got around to publish it until now. So with a few months delay, here it is.