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Showing posts from January, 2015

GUI in Java Revisited (2015)

Which GUI framework should I use for my Java application ? Brief History: AWT -> SWT -> Swing When I had to choose which IDE gives me the best Swing WYSIWYG builder Brief History: Eclipse crappy builder -> Netbeans Matisse -> Google's Windows Builder (donated to Eclipse) All of the above were my conclusions till 2014, but much had changed, HTML5 is rising with many many 3rd party frameworks Jquery MVC frameworks, JavaScript server side frameworks etc. In the Java scene, Oracle has introduced JavaFX several years ago but it wasn't built specifically for forms, and it had it's labor aches. Nowdays, JavaFX has matured much, Oracle has pushed Swing aside and introduced a very nice WYSIWYG form editor for JavaFX, and HTML5 isn't a myth but a very live framework. So what are my conclusions? Html5 sounds great, but I need some more straight forward out-of-the-box html5 with Java solution instead of a bunch of 3rd party J

Build a simple & cheap arcade machine

I want another machine at my home which will be dedicated to games These are my requirements Many different games without the hassle of installing and setting them up (console emulator) Cheap machine (console emulator, probably not one of the newer ones like ps2 and up) Joysticks (several bucks at eBay) Multiplayer support Wireless controllers (so the kids won't damage the machine when they pull the controllers) Nice launcher (So each game will be presented nicely) Launcher could scrape online databases for the details on every game Wifi support (optional, as I can connect to RJ45 once and get all of the scraping done) HDMI output Community support After some digging I think I can get the best results with Android or Rspberry PI. I think there is better support for the Raspberry machines, so I went on the Raspberry PI B+. So I need the following:  Buy Raspberry PI b+ with a simple case (latest version) (about 45$ with shipping etc) OS (linux