JPz’log

If you started developing in Java only 2 or 3 years ago, you may not have known the good old times when Swing was ugly by default, Apache Jakarta or the Codehaus did not exist (or at least they were not that ubiquitous), the all-XML madness was about to start, and Ruby was still this hacker language that corporations did not care about.

I remember a few libraries and applications of that time. Incidentally, that was also the time when I wrote the first versions of the venerable IzPack Java installer

• XML was starting to be all the rage, but at that time, there was no such javax.xml.* package in the JDK AElfred used to be a nice SAX-style parser.
• Another XML library project, focusing on DOM-style interactions was NanoXML. IzPack still heavily relies on it, but the project has been dead for a long time (and you can’t even find the website anymore).
• JEdit was a famous programmers best-friend editor. Designed with a good plugins system, it had an strong momentum. It has dropped recently, especially since the main author decided to focus his attention on a language nobody cares about. Oh and he now also bashes everything which contains the word Java or that doesn’t emphasize how superior functional programming languages are to anything else…
• Jext was another editor based on a old version of the JEdit editor component. Romain stopped developping it, but since then, he has done quite a few interesting things JEdit was probably better from a technical point of view, but Jext had a better user interface. I wrote many versions of IzPack using Jext until I switched to Eclipse, and now a combination of IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse.
• Jython, a port of Python to Java was probably the first attempt at scripting languages on the JVM that had some success. The project then fell asleep for a while, sticking on Python 1.5. The development seems to have started again recently following the hype for dynamic languages on the JVM!
• SkinLF was a trendy Swing look and feel providing skinnable themes written by Fred Lavigne.
• Kunststoff was also a very trendy look and feel for Java. It was basically an extension of the default Swing Metal theme with grey colors and gradients. Oh, and I also contributed some code to this project

This list is all that came back to my memories for this evening, but please do not hesitate if you remember another project of the good old times of Java!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under English, Java.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.