Month: November 2012

GWT using Activities and Places

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I’ve tried to simplify and categorize my vision of “Activities and Places” in real application since HelloWorld app from Google’s page doesn’t provide overview of the full-cycle development and shows us only 10% of the iceberg. Maybe this diagram will help someone either. Although in most cases the whole page can be one active area, example shows how to use two independent displays on the page (in this case Menu and Content). It can be useful, for example if you have completely different page views for site-administrator and user.

Online tools for quick prototyping

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All tools mentioned in this post are free at the time it’s been written

  1. wireframe.cc – very simple and nice tool for web-pages prototyping.
    Idea: Select an area and choose which type of the object it will be.
  2. moqups.com – tool with a little more sophisticated interface and therefore has more functionality.
    Idea: Make a composition from many proposed samples (eg. switchers, diagrams, buttons, combos, radio buttons, keyboards) or create your own using simple shapes
  3. cacoo.com – has a bunch stencils for creation of a different type diagrams, UIs and schemes
  4. lumzy.com – has a lot of common with Cacoo but has more kind of elements for interface prototyping. However Lumzy is clumzy, you need to be familiar with it to quickly find something you need. Catalog of the components has pure design and organization.
  5. iphonemockup.lkmc.ch – this one doesn’t fit current topic as it’s designed for iPhones’ UI wireframing only but I really like it. It’s so simple and of course pencil style is fantastic. Too bad I didn’t find something like that for multi-platform interfaces.

GWT Designer for Eclipse Juno on Ubuntu 12.X

ipcreeper 9 Comments

Today I’ve tried to install Google Eclipse Plugin to draw some forms for my GWT-based app and caught the exception:

GWT http-server started at 127.0.0.1:45658
#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007fb2229d45a0, pid=8150, tid=140404439688960
#
# JRE version: 6.0_37-b06
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (20.12-b01 mixed mode linux-amd64 compressed oops)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0+0x14245a0]  void WTF::freeOwnedGPtr<_GdkEvent>(_GdkEvent*)+0x15df0
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as:
# /home/ipcreeper/hs_err_pid8150.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
#   http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp
# The crash happened outside the Java Virtual Machine in native code.
# See problematic frame for where to report the bug.
#

Searching for at least an hour I’ve finally found the solution:

 

Step 1:

Download and install libhunspell package (xulrunner has a dependency on it):

http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/amd64/libhunspell-1.2-0/download

sudo dpkg -i libhunspell-1.2-0_1.2.14-4_amd64.deb

Step 2:

Download and install xulrunner package:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/amd64/xulrunner-1.9.2/download

sudo dpkg -i xulrunner-1.9.2_1.9.2.28+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1_amd64.deb

Be aware that both libhunspell and xulrunner should be either i386 or amd64 version.

Step 3:

Open eclipse.ini and add path to installed xulrunner:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.28

Step 4:

If editor still not running, try to set the environment variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS to false before starting Eclipse. Do it with following command:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=false

How to switch version of Java in Ubuntu

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Had a little headache trying to change version of JDK back from 1.7 to 1.6, so here is the instruction:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-java


Then type:


sudo update-java


… and you’ll see the window with versions of Java to switch to.


Voila.


P.S. To extend the list of available JDK’s download the version you need and extract it to /usr/lib/jvm/