Google Sidewiki entry by Andrew

I was looking for this to help me assemble my assignments for my AJAX course. I had lots of code and html files that I had to assemble into a PDF for turn in. This made it much easier!

in reference to: Automator Tip of the Week #3: Convert Word Documents to PDF | Mac Help from Maciverse (view on Google Sidewiki)

FxBattle will be built by Gradle

One of the hold ups with FxBattle was JavaFx 1.3. When that was resolved, we'd forgotten how to build the system. It took a night at JavaOne to get it running again. We can build and run now using Fx 1.3 (which is WAY FASTER- YEAH!).

However, it's a big old hacky system and I don't like it. I used Maven, but lack of documentation, and severe rigidness were sufficient to make me want to abandon the technology. At JavaOne I learned about Gradle. It's a different kind of build toolkit.

I'm finding that I like it immensely. It is somewhat immature right now, but the activity surrounding it seems huge. The documentation is surprisingly complete for a product that isn't even version 1.0 yet. I've had some trouble getting plugins working in version 0.8. It required a bit of hacking and wasn't particularly strait forward. This said, 0.9 will have a much better plugin system (just drop a Jar into your system). There also appear to be plans for a plugin repository in the future so you can just ask for it by name.

I don't see a plugin for Gradle which builds JavaFx. If the plugin development documentation gets better, I may start such a plugin. At least, we'll have to be able to build JavaFx in FxBattle through Gradle.

Learning AJAX

Turns out that you should know JSP before you start learning AJAX. Well, looks like I get to learn both together. Just started night school for a Masters in CS. I think it'll be interesting, but I have some trepidation about time constraints. It should help that APT is going to freeze soon so that I won't be under as much pressure to deliver the outstanding bug fixes/features.