Today in office, one of my teammates pointed me to a very interesting site http://labs.codecademy.com/. It has been around for some 4-5 months and is still at a very nascent stage. The site promises/aims to teach you programming online without downloading any IDE or editor.Currently it offers courses only in Javascript, but Python and Ruby courses are also on the way.
Each course is divided into several lessons and a lesson consists of several exercises.To encourage the learner are incentives in the form of badges and points. The lessons are pretty straightforward and are presented in a very logical fashion.An online editor is provided for the learner to key in the commands and see the output.And oh, did I mention that you can create your own lessons? Frankly, it's difficult not to be wowed by this thing.
So today, I spent some time in this place learning javascript.From my end, codeacademy has a big and emphatic thumbs up :).It really makes learning a new programming language less painful. Can't wait for the upcoming lessons!!
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Playing with FlashDevelop
The project I was assigned to in my new job had a web-based Flash UI and looked pretty cool!!. In the past, I have never been directly involved in any web UI related work. So I thought that it would be a great opportunity to learn something new and that's basically the inspiration behind this post.
While searching for a suitable Flash Editor, I came across FlashDevelop, FlashBuilder and FDT. Both FlashBuilder and FDT are eclipse plugins for flash and flex development with FDT being the editor of choice for ActionScript coding. The only downside is that these two eclipse plugins have an attached price tag. However, FlashDevelop is a free and open source editor. It provides support for ActionScript coding and haXe development.According to this, FlashDevelop is more generally a great web developer IDE with integrated source-control support(svn, git, mercurial), tasks/todo, snippets, XML/HTML completion and built-in zen-coding for HTML.
I downloaded the FlashDevelop executable and tried to install it on my dev machine. The installation was however not a smooth ride as the installer kept failing in downloading third party tools (I guess some proxy/timeout issue).I spent a good one hour troubleshooting this error, but couldn't find much help on the net. Finally, I found a workaround here, which worked like a charm :). Now, I have my editor up and running.
FlashDevelop has it's own wiki, which has loads of helpful information and very convenient for beginners.I will need to spend a lot of time here going through the various concepts and buzz words(ActionScript, Flex, haXe, AIR....blah,blah,blah).
Some of the things I want to achieve with FlashDevelop are,
1. Create a small movie. It will actually be a slideshow of pictures with music playing in the background.
2. Create a sample Flash desktop application (prototype of my PoC work in office??)
3. Create a sample Flash web application (prototype of my PoC work in office??)
4. Explore the various features and capabilities of FlashDevelop.
Good Luck girl!! :)
While searching for a suitable Flash Editor, I came across FlashDevelop, FlashBuilder and FDT. Both FlashBuilder and FDT are eclipse plugins for flash and flex development with FDT being the editor of choice for ActionScript coding. The only downside is that these two eclipse plugins have an attached price tag. However, FlashDevelop is a free and open source editor. It provides support for ActionScript coding and haXe development.According to this, FlashDevelop is more generally a great web developer IDE with integrated source-control support(svn, git, mercurial), tasks/todo, snippets, XML/HTML completion and built-in zen-coding for HTML.
I downloaded the FlashDevelop executable and tried to install it on my dev machine. The installation was however not a smooth ride as the installer kept failing in downloading third party tools (I guess some proxy/timeout issue).I spent a good one hour troubleshooting this error, but couldn't find much help on the net. Finally, I found a workaround here, which worked like a charm :). Now, I have my editor up and running.
FlashDevelop has it's own wiki, which has loads of helpful information and very convenient for beginners.I will need to spend a lot of time here going through the various concepts and buzz words(ActionScript, Flex, haXe, AIR....blah,blah,blah).
Some of the things I want to achieve with FlashDevelop are,
1. Create a small movie. It will actually be a slideshow of pictures with music playing in the background.
2. Create a sample Flash desktop application (prototype of my PoC work in office??)
3. Create a sample Flash web application (prototype of my PoC work in office??)
4. Explore the various features and capabilities of FlashDevelop.
Good Luck girl!! :)
Monday, January 2, 2012
Eclipse Plugins for Swing
Today had some free time in office and so thought of learning GUI development in Java Swing and SWT. But I got stuck for quite some time when searching for a suitable eclipse plugin for swing/swt GUI development.Quite a few forums recommended using NetBeans IDE over Eclipse for swing development. However, I did manage to find the following eclipse plugins for Swing
1. Visual Editor : It is the oldest swing plugin on the block. It's an Eclipse project, licensed under EPL, that has been archived since June 2011 due to lack of development support. Quite a few forums had complaints about the buggy nature of VE.For more information, refer http://www.eclipse.org/archived/
2. Visual Swing : It is a google code project by William Chen. This free plugin is designed to ease the pain of using Visual Editor. It has been there since 2008, but is still beta. For more information, refer http://code.google.com/p/visualswing4eclipse/
3. Windows Builder Pro : It has been donated to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation and is in the process of becoming an Eclipse Project.It is a bidirectional GUI designer that supports Sun Swing, IBM SWT, Google GWT technologies. It also supports the popular JJGoodies FormLayout that enables creation of flexible swing applications for windows eenvironment. For more information, refer http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/windowbuilder-pro-gui-designer
4. Swing GUI Designer : It is a commercial Swing plugin by Genuitec, LLC. It has been recently launched in 2009. It is a MyEclipse plugin and an implementation of Netbeans Matisse. For more information, refer http://marketplace.eclipse.org/node/1101
5. JForm Designer : It is a commercial Swing GUI designer by FormDev Software. It also has support for the popular JGoodies FormLayout,GroupLayout, TableLayout and GridBagLayout.For more information, refer http://www.formdev.com/jformdesigner/
For now, I have decided to use WindowsBuilderPro plugin for eclipse as it's both free and open source and also has support for both Swing and SWT.Let's see how this turns out :)
1. Visual Editor : It is the oldest swing plugin on the block. It's an Eclipse project, licensed under EPL, that has been archived since June 2011 due to lack of development support. Quite a few forums had complaints about the buggy nature of VE.For more information, refer http://www.eclipse.org/archived/
2. Visual Swing : It is a google code project by William Chen. This free plugin is designed to ease the pain of using Visual Editor. It has been there since 2008, but is still beta. For more information, refer http://code.google.com/p/visualswing4eclipse/
3. Windows Builder Pro : It has been donated to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation and is in the process of becoming an Eclipse Project.It is a bidirectional GUI designer that supports Sun Swing, IBM SWT, Google GWT technologies. It also supports the popular JJGoodies FormLayout that enables creation of flexible swing applications for windows eenvironment. For more information, refer http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/windowbuilder-pro-gui-designer
4. Swing GUI Designer : It is a commercial Swing plugin by Genuitec, LLC. It has been recently launched in 2009. It is a MyEclipse plugin and an implementation of Netbeans Matisse. For more information, refer http://marketplace.eclipse.org/node/1101
5. JForm Designer : It is a commercial Swing GUI designer by FormDev Software. It also has support for the popular JGoodies FormLayout,GroupLayout, TableLayout and GridBagLayout.For more information, refer http://www.formdev.com/jformdesigner/
For now, I have decided to use WindowsBuilderPro plugin for eclipse as it's both free and open source and also has support for both Swing and SWT.Let's see how this turns out :)
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