PC Magazine gives Creator 4 out of 5 stars

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PC Magazine has published a positive a review of Creator, giving it 4 out of 5 stars.

Shipping Javadocs versus Extracting them

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

The JDK ships with a "src.zip" file - the sources to the java classes. Yet getting the JDK javadocs requires a separate download - and the download is not small.

But of course the javadocs can be derived from the src.zip file, since the comments are all in the source. So part of the JDK installation should offer to extract the javadocs for you - by running the javadoc command on the src.zip file!!

Creator ships with a bundled JDK, but we don't bundle the javadocs. This should give us a simple solution to that, to improve the out-of-the-box experience.

Creator Patch 2 is available

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Go to the Update Center and grab it. There's a large number of fixes in it, many in my area (the designer) to for example handle multiple forms on a page, and better snap-to-grid behavior, as discussed in the forums. Plus we rewrote some of the deployment filecopy code to work around some issues on the Linux 2.6 kernel so Creator should work fine without workarounds there as well now.

Of course what you -really- want is patch 3 which will have not just bug fixes but address some usability issues in the designer and application outline.... but you'll have to be patient a little while longer :)

"Pictorial" created by user

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Somebody just posted a tutorial for creating a google-battle webapp using Creator. Well done and lots of screenshots. If anyone is aware of other "third-party" tutorials for Creator let me know. It's really fun to see people using the tool!

He called it a "pictorial". That's a pretty good name for tutorials with lots of pictures.

XHTML is not XML!!

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

I was always under the impression that XHTML documents are XML documents - with HTML semantics for the tags. You know - must close all tags, tags must be nested, etc. But I recently discovered that that's not the case!

I had this weird bug in Creator that if you did "Preview In Browser" for the following document (not including html, body etc.), rather than have the browser show the text AFTER the text area, it showed up inside the text area!

<textarea/>Hello World

In particular, in XML you can use a minimized form, such that <foo></foo> can be written as <foo/> instead. But as it turns out, that's not always true in XHTML. In particular, some tags must always be minimized (such as br), and other tags can never be minimized - such as p, div, textarea, and friends. The definition of this is all written in one of the appendices to the xhtml spec.

In Creator we were using standard Xerces to parse and serialize the markup, but because of the above "feature" I can't do that anymore, since xerces will not correctly serialize tags as either minimized or not minimized based on the tag name. This was fixed in patch 1.

Of course, I'm still puzzled as to why Mozilla and other browsers choose to treat the fragment above such that the text shows up inside the textarea... perhaps this is some sort of quirks-mode handling which makes old html documents with errors show up correctly?

The Caps Lock key MUST DIE!!!

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Seriously. Who uses the caps-lock key?

Other than people composing Nigerian Scam (419) e-mails - you know the type, "DEAR SIR... CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL... typo typo typo."

I got used to Sun keyboards that put the control key in the location where capslock keys are found on PC keyboards. When I used Linux and Solaris x86 I was able to use xmodmap to remap the caps lock key to act as a control key - but of course anytime I try to use somebody else's computer, such as at an internet cafe when travelling, or worse yet, when doing a demo on fixed hardware somewhere - I keep hitting caps lock and getting myself into trouble. I don't use Windows often enough to justify searching for a program

On my mac powerbook I've found a program to remap the capslock key as well - but it doesn't always work. After suspend and at occasional random times, the key has memories of its previous life and decides to switch case rather than put Emacs into the right mood for the next keystroke.

So here's my question -- why do we give such a prominent position to a key that's probably not used? Or am I missing some big class of business users that say work in spreadsheets with the capslock mode turned on? Since people use the control key a lot (to do ctrl-c and ctrl-v to copy and paste for example), can't we put the control key up there on all keyboards? It's certainly a more comfortable position than where it currently sits.

First Post

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

Hi. This is my first blog entry.

I work on the Sun Java Studio Creator product (formerly, and by the development team fondly) known as "Rave". (Well, when going public with it last spring we had to rename it "Project Rave" to avoid trademark issues.)

I'm responsible for the visual page designer, as well as the navigation editor.

On this page I plan to post Creator-related news and thoughts - as well as any other random things I want to say. Tune in if you're a Creator user, or if you haven't tried it yet, head over to www.sun.com/jscreator.