News news

OK, my PC is repaired now and kick ass (since December). I had to replace the defunct hard drive by new one, in perfect shape, and with 160 GB instead of just 60 for the old malfunctioning one ;-). Plus I added some memory. So this is all right now thanks. Except that I had to reinstall all my apps, and tried to find copies (even old ones) of things I had only on this PC...

As for development news, I will shortly upload the version 0.2 my Application Framework library. OK, maybe you think that it values very little in front of Sun's appframework an you may be true, but I developed this library before we heard of appframework, it helped me to not reinvent the wheel for my own applications every time, and now it would be some work to adapt all my apps to this new framework, even if it is better. However, I will surely do that at the end, but for now I have no reason not to maintain my own library. And that's what is great about Java, you have the liberty to choose amongst several ready-made solutions for any of your needs ;-) Even if you are not interested, you should know that the actual version of this library is working well, I'm using it in approx. 7 to 10 of my own apps... OK, no more advertising.

What I would like to do (in the area of development) for the new year (and probably I will never do) is:

• A Perl interpreter coded in Java, going from the Sleep language


• A POV-Ray port in Java. No need for now to bother about license, because I will probably never have something good or complete enough to be able to C compiler or interpreter coded in Java, would be great to be able to debug C applications with the Java debugger


• A pure-Java port of the Open Dynamics Engine


• A SVG to WMF converter built on top of Batik, the pure-Java SVG library. I have almost something working now, so this one could be done for this year

What interests me in Java ports of big libraries like ODE or POV-Ray, apart from the "because it's fun" reason, is the fact that it should be interesting to have an idea of the performance difference between the original C or C++ app performance and Java ;-)


But as you can see, these are mainly dreams for the new year. Not that it is not possible to do, but because I have a lot of other things to do, and this would involve a lot of work...