Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2002-8-18

Newsflash: Java not as hard as I expected

The manual nature of building Java GUIs (and the fact that they never look native, no matter what platform you use) has always put me off learning Java (and driven me towards C#, which makes very nice native Windows dialogs). However, recently various people have been talking about Thinlet, a very small GUI library (billed as "for really thin clients"), so I thought I'd give it a go.

It's very cool: building Thinlet dialogs is a lot like making web pages. You define your dialog with a bit of XML (example) and code callbacks in Java.

The result of a few hours hacking is a little Blogger API client:

        ThinBlog

You can use it to post to a Blogger weblog, or if you change the server address to http://127.0.0.1:5335/RPC2 and configure Radio to allow Blogger-style posting (check the box on this page and enter a login name and password on this page) you can use it to post to your Radio weblog.

Enjoy!