Desktop Java

In one of my projects I recently noticed that it was hard for the user to see whether the content of a ScrollPane instance was currently scrolled or not. One way of making this more clear is to add a drop shadow to the top of the scroll pane. This is also something suggested by Google’s Material Design. So I ...

Back in the days when I was still implementing UIs in Swing I used to be a big fan of MigLayout (“one layout manager to rule them all”, right Mikael?). One of the features I really liked was the possibility to define different behaviors when a component became invisible. MigLayout allowed me to either preserve the space that the now ...

To understand what’s wrong with Java desktop apps, let’s take a look at the new features of JavaFX, a leading UI framework for desktop applications. It becomes obvious that it is trending towards the web approaches, borrowing more and more features from the web world. JavaFX supports a subset of CSS features, accompanying it with their own properties. However, this ...

Introduction Reactive programming’s popularity has tremendously grown over the last 4 or 5 years. This can tell us that the use case of reactive applications is now valid more than ever. The strain on backend systems has increased and accordingly the need to handle this strain with minimal resources. Reactive programming is seen as a way to increase efficiency and ...

Introduction Parallax is a visual effect where you combine two layered images moving at different speeds to achieve a sense of depth. Think about when you’re driving on the road and you see the trees close to you moving fast whereas the trees that are further away will move in the same direction but slower, the result is that you ...

Spock is a Java testing framework, created in 2008 by Peter Niederwieser a software engineer with GradleWare, which facilitates amongst other things BDD.  Leveraging this example, a story may be defined as: Story: Returns go to stock As a store owner In order to keep track of stock I want to add items back to stock when they're returned. Scenario ...

For several reasons, many GWT users ditched the RPC mechanism which is the standard way offered by GWT to call the backend. They found themseleves lost between GWT RequestBuilder and other external librairies which may or may not fit their application model. The objective of this post is to go through the well known HTTP/Rest libraries in GWT in an ...

JSON & GWT There was recently an interesting discussion in GWT Users group about best practices for serializing/deserializing JSON in the client side. This post aims to highlight its important points. There is so far three different ways of converting an object to JSON and back from the client side in GWT: gwt-jackson framework: gwt-jackson wraps some of the functionalities ...

Progressive or not progressive… If you have been designing or developing web applications for a while, you would have probably came across the term Progressive Web application a tons of times, and will probably do so for the coming years. You probably wondered what exactly is the definition of PWAs, how we identify one, and how we build one. According ...