The JTextArea

I started using the JTextArea control in my applets. Seems all the good controls are in the "javax.swing" package. You pass in the height to the JTextArea constructor. However it seems that the thing will allow more than that many rows in the control. The control seems only bounded by the applet window size. What the heck?

You use newlines in the JTextArea text to make the thing jump to the next row in the control. One thing is strange though. The default behavior does not seem to provide anything other than the text in the control. There is no border or scrollbar or anything. Maybe there is some other control that is more like the Windows control I am used to.

My First Applet

Here I am in my full week of training. This is an independent study for me. My goal is to learn applet programing. Read a couple chapters in my school textbook. We always skipped the applet and other GUI sections. Unfortunately the applet chapter requires you to read the big Java Swing chapter. I have skipped it. So I am going to be having some troubles.

Applets do not have a main function. Instead they have an init. They close when the web page that contains them closes. The containing web page is written in HTML. The applet itself runs on the client machine. There are some security restrictions like an applet cannot run a program, read a file, or write a file. You should test your applets on many browsers including multiple versions of the same browser.

The older class for applets is Applet. Go figure. You cannot use Swing with this old style class. You also cannot do icons or menus. Use buttons instead. I found that I could load an HTML page which referenced an applet. However when I recoded and recompiled the applet, an Internet Explorer 6 refresh would not run the new version of the applet. That was annoying. Instead I decided to use appletviewer. Here is another strange thing. The reload function in appletviewer causes the window to disappear and the viewer to freeze. Another funny thing was that I tried to use Graphics2D in my paint method. It compiled but just output a light blue screen. All my graphics were gone. I guess I can make do with the normal Graphics class.

Game Programming

I just started reading The Black Art of Java Game Programming. And I tell you what. I already have a good feeling about this book. Sure it was written in 1996 when Java 1 just came out. However by chapter 2 we are already learning about animation. Damn.

One thing that struck me as odd was that the authors of the book are young. Or more precisely they are still in school. One of these is an undergrad, and the other a grad. That does not mean they are junior. They seemed to be on the cutting edge of Java right when it came out.

This book does specialize in teaching you how to code network games. The authors believe that object oriented programming is the way to go for creating games. They are going to teach me a lot about AWT (since Swing has not been invented I guess).

Chapter 1 already got me into a lot of Java syntax. It also highly recommends you use arrays instead of lists for speed. Back in 1996, Java ran a lot slower than compiled C or C++. I also learned some basic stuff I was never taught in my Java college class. The import statement allows you to reference classes in packages. However you can still access those classes without an import by using the classes fully qualified name. I did not know that. I am excited about getting into the meat of this book. Who knows? I might be turning out some cool games in no time.

Java Running on Apple II c

I just heard that a subset of Java can now run on the Apple IIc computer. Bamm. Of course there are some limitations. You need a real Apple II c with the 65C02 microprocessor. That means Apple II e computers don't work with this port.

The good news is that some of Swing is available. No AWT or JDBC is supported yet. The eventual goal is to port all of Java to the Apple. Right now there is also a JDistro available. This is a desktop which is written in Java Swing. JDistro is a limited version too that can only run 1 app at a time.

The whole thing fits on 3 floppies. Source code will be made public. This seems pretty hard core as the Apple II is some hardware from yesteryear. Now we just need Java ported to the Tandy Coco III, and I will be complete.