Completion, iOS 7 Update And The 20M Mark

Exciting news this week, Chen FINALLY did what we procrastinated on for so long and wrote an auto-complete text field!

This is really easy to incorporate into your code, just replace your usage of TextField with AutoCompleteTextField and define the data that the auto complete should work from. There is a default implementation that accepts a String array or a ListModel for completion strings, this can work well for a "small" set of thousands (or tens of thousands) of entries.

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Folk Dancing And General Updates

 Who would have thought Hungarian folk dance would be so entertaining!
Can't. stop. watching....

Its been a busy week mostly spent on updating the build server code so its iOS 7 ready, during that time we also managed to get some other things done...

These are some of the highlights:  You may recall the ImageViewer class that I mentioned a while back, it will now be a part of the designer and has some small improvements to its event handling as well as keyboard handling.

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Codename One Article In SDJ

Remember the Poker app we teased a couple of weeks ago?
Now you can read all about it in SDJ, the entire article is in the downloadable PDF (please buy the magazine!).

We'll try to post the full source code into SVN and get into more details about it here. If you have any questions/comments related to the article feel free to ask in the comments section right here.

It's In The Bag

GridBag that is. So GridBagLayout is one of the most notorious of the layout managers in Java in fact for many developers it symbolizes the failure of the layout manager concept. That is the main reason why we never added it.


Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a very prominent Swing developer and he asked me whether we had gridbag support. I answered that we do not and repeated the regular "no one likes it" line, turns out he does like it and has a lot of Swing code that uses GridBag!

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Teamwork (and other things)

While Java rocks for teamwork because of its strict and streamlined heuristics, our resource files are less ideal. However we are changing that in the next update to Codename One!

The reason we chose to put everything into a binary resource file should be obvious: small size, portability. These are two critical features we had in mind when we designed the resource file format, we also wanted it to be really simple so we can e-mail it to our designer and so people could use it without an IDE (which back in 2006 was far more common). We initially thought about creating an XML file format which a special tool will convert into the res file format (and we had some prior work on the matter such as the XML ant tasks) but these proved to be cumbersome to maintain.

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Use The Source

To me the biggest advantage in Codename One over pretty much any other mobile solution is that its realistically open source. Realistically means that even an average developer can dig into 90% of the Codename One source code, change it and contribute to it!

However, sadly most developers don't even try and most of those who do focus only on the aspect of building for devices rather than the advantage of much easier debugging. By incorporating the Codename One sources you can instantly see the effect of changes we made in SVN without waiting for a plugin update. You can, debug into Codename One code which can help you pinpoint issues in your own code and also in resolving issues in ours!

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In A Pinch

Codename One has supported multi-touch and effectively pinch to zoom events from the very first release. However, it wasn't intuitive to write code that would handle pinch to zoom. We just committed new pinch callback events to component which effectively allows you to zoom in/out with gestures.

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You Can Bet On It

Recently the guys from Software Developer Journal contacted us about writing a mobile gaming article, since quite a few Codename One developers use it to write games we decided to accept the offer and I wrote an article titled: "Writing casual games In Java for mobile devices". In this article we create a simple poker game mockup that is fully functional (although it doesn't include betting, AI or networking), but you can drag the cards to have them replaced and click the deck to deal new cards.

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