Sunday 1 February 2009

Remember this post: I talked about my two first open Source projects:

  • MDIFramework aim to provide a ready-to-use desktop application infrastructure in Java. I mainly created this project because I always reused the same piece of code in my own work, so I wanted to have a generic library instead. I thought it was better to open source it, so that's what I've done.

  • MDIUtilities is a utility library with various classes in the swing, IO, geometry, etc... fields. There's tons of other libraries in the open, but it is not always easy when all you want is a small library to provide utility classes. Sometimes you could end-up with tons of different libraries, for which you only use few classes.


Well these two projects have both been bumped to 0.3 version. In the hope it can be useful...

About MDIFramework, maybe you will say: Why not using Eclipse ? Well Eclipse is a huge framework. When you develop with Eclipse in mind, you are in the Eclipse ecosystem, and you end with a lot of Eclipse dependencies. That can be a good thing, but if you want to keep control on your work, and avoid to bear the burden of too many dependencies (or limit the size of your install), you should look elsewhere. Plus Eclipse does not handle everything for you.
But why not using appframework ? Unfortunately (for the moment) appframework does not manage several things that are handled by MDIFramework:

  • Plugins

  • dynamic menus

  • storing / retrieving non GUI parameters between sessions

  • managing FileTypes


...And MDIFramework was created before appframework even existed on the Web (2006).

1 comment:

Brent said...

Are you still interested in open-sourcing the ARINC 661 part of the library as well? Is there anything I can do to help?